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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



EGYPT 

AND ITS MONUMENTS 



EGYPT 

AND ITS MONUMENTS 

BY 

ROBERT HICHENS 



ILLUSTRATED EY 

JULES GUERIN 

AND WITH PHOTOGRAPHS 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 



908 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

Two CoDies Received 

OCT 22 1908 

Copyrletit Entry 

CLASS CC XXc. No, 

COPY B. 



Copyright, 1908, by 
The Century Co. 

Published October, jgoi 






\S> 



THE DE VINNE f'RESS 



CONTENTS 



J PAGE 

THE PYRAMIDS 5 

II 
THE SPHINX i8 

III 
SAKKARA 28 

IV 
ABYDOS 37 

V 
THE NILE ■ 46 

VI 
DENDERAH 52 

VII 
KARNAK 66 

VIII 
LUXOR 88 

IX 
COLOSSI OF MEMNON to; 

X 
MEDINET-ABU 120 



V 



CONTENTS 



^i PAGE 

THE RAMESSEUM 132 

xir 

DEIR-EL-BAHARI 148 

XIII 
THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS 166 

XIV 
EDFU 174 

XV 
KOM OMBOS 196 

XVI 
PHIL^E 212 

XVII 
"PHARAOH'S BED" 228 

XVIII 
OLD CAIRO 252 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



The Sphinx Frontispiece 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

The P_yramicls of Ghizel: 4 

From a Photograpli. 

From the summit of the Great Pyramid 7 

From a Photograpli. 

Looking down the main passage of the Great Pyramid . . . . 11 

From a Photograph. 

The Pyramids of Ghizeh 16 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

The Sphinx 20 

From a Photograplt. 

The Sphinx and the Second Pyramid 25 

From a Photograph. 

The Step Pyramid of Sakkara 29 - 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

Entrance to the Tomb of Thi 34 

From a Photograph. 

Temple of Seti I, Abydos 39 

From a Photograph. 

The Great Hall of Abydos 44., 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

Village on the site of Ancient Memphis 48 

From a Photograph. 

On the Roof of the Temple of Hathor, Denderah 53 

From a Photograph. 

The Temple of Hathor, Denderah 57 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

vii 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 



Figures of Cleopatra and her son Caesarion on the wall of the 

Temple of Hathor 62 

From a Photograph. 

Interior, Temple of Khuns, Karnak 67 

From a Photograph. 

The Great Temple of Karnak 72 • 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

The Sacred Lotus in the Temple at Karnak 76 

From a Pliotograph. 

Entrance to Temple of Rameses III, Karnak 81 

From a Photograph. 

The Sacred Lake, Karnak 85 - 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

The Temple of Luxor from the easterly Pylon go 

From a Photograph. 

The Court of Amenhotep III, Temple of Luxor 93. 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

In the Temple of Luxor 97 ' 

From a Photograph. 

Obelisk and Pylon, Luxor 102 

From a Photograph. 

The Great Colonnade, Temple of Luxor 105 • 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

Near view of the Colossi of Memnon 109 . 

From a Photograph, 

The Colossi of Memnon 114 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

The Valley of the Tombs of the Kings 117 

From a Photograph. 

The Temple of Medinet- Abu 122 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

Corner of Second Court, Temple of Rameses III, Medinet-Abu . 125 

From a Photograph. 

The Ramesseum 129 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

viii 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

"The Thinking Place of Rameses the Great." Hall of Lotus Col- 
umns, Ramesseum 133 

From a Photograph. 

The Plain of Thebes from the roof of the Ramesseum . . . .137 

From a Photograph. 

Hall of Lotus Columns, Ramesseum 141 

From a Photograph. 

Pilasters and broken colossal statue of Rameses II 146 

From a Photograpli. 

The Temple of Queen Hatasu, Deir-el-Bahari I49 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

Recent excavations at Deir-el-Bahari 153 

From a Photograph. 

"The half-naked workmen toiling and sweating in the sun" . .15 7 

From a Photograph. 

The Vache Hathor of Denderah 162 

From a Photograpli. 

Painted tomb chamber of Prince Sen-nofer, Thebes 167 

From a Photograph. 

Temple of Esneh 171 

From a Photograph. 

Prayer in the Desert 175 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

The Temple of Edfu iSo 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

Pylon, Temple of Edfu . . . 1S3 

From a Photograph. 

The Temple of Edfu from the top of the Pylon 190 

From a Photograph. 

The Court, Temple of Edfu 193 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

Hypostyle Hall, Kom Ombos 197 

From a Photograph. 

The Temple of Kom Ombos 201 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Temple of Kom Ombos. Screen wall of Hypostyle Hall . . . 206 

From a Photograph. 

The Island of Elephantine, from Assuan 210 

From a Photograph. 

The Isle of Philag before the construction of the dam 213 

From a Photograph. 

The Sacred Isle of Philag 217- 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

The Temple of Isis, Philas 222 

From a Photograph. 

Nearly submerged columns, Isle of Philas 225 

From a Photograph. 

Pharaoh's Bed, before the construction of the dam 229 . 

From a Photograph. 

" Pharaoh's Bed," Island of Philse 233 - 

Painted by Jules Gudrin. 

In "Pharaoh's Bed," Island of Phils 238 ^ 

From a Photograph. 

Fore-court of the Temple of Isis and " Pharaoh's Bed," Philas . 241 

P>om a Photograph. 

Abu-Simbel 245 

Painted by Jules Guerin. 

Abu-Simbel, from the river 249 

From a Photograph. 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 



EGYPT AND ITS 
MONUMENTS 

I 

THE PYRAMIDS 

WHY do you come to Egypt? Do you come 
to gain a dream, or to regain lost dreams 
of old; to gild your life with the drowsy 
gold of romance, to lose a creeping sorrow, to forget 
that too many of your hours are sullen, gray, bereft? 
What do you wish of Egypt? 

The Sphinx will not ask you, will not care. The 
Pyramids, lifting their unnumbered stones to the clear 
and wonderful skies, have held, still hold, their secrets; 
but they do not seek for yours. The terrific temples, 
the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead desires 
of men, crouching in and under the immeasurable 
sands, will mock you with their brooding silence, with 
their dim and somber repose. The brown children of 
the Nile, the toilers who sing their antique songs by the 

5 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

shadoof and the sakieh, the dragomans, the smihng 
gobhn merchants, the Bedouins who lead your camel 
into the pale recesses of the dunes — these will not 
trouble themselves about your deep desires, your per- 
haps yearning hunger of the heart and the imagination. 

Yet Egypt is not unresponsive. 

I came back to her with dread, after fourteen years 
of absence — years filled for me with the rumors of her 
changes. And on the very day of my arrival she calmly 
reassured me. She told me in her supremely magical 
way that all was well with her. She taught me once 
more a lesson I had not quite forgotten, but that I was 
glad to learn again — the lesson that Egypt owes her 
most subtle, most inner beauty to Kheper, although 
she owes her marvels to men; that when he created 
the sun which shines upon her, he gave her the luster 
of her life, and that those who come to her must be 
sun-worshipers if they would truly and intimately un- 
derstand the treasure of romance that lies heaped within 
her bosom. 

Thoth, says the old legend, traveled in the Boat of 
the Sun. If you would love Egypt rightly, you, too, 
must be a traveler in that bark. You must not fear to 
steep yourself in the mystery of gold, in the mystery 
of heat, in the mystery of silence that seems softly 
showered out of the sun. The sacred white lotus must 
be your emblem, and Horus, the hawk-headed, merged 
in Ra, your special deity. Scarcely had I set foot once 

6 



THE PYRAMIDS 

more in Egypt before Thoth lifted me into the Boat of 
the Sun and soothed my fears to sleep. 

I arrived in Cairo. I saw new and vast hotels ; I 
saw crowded streets; brilliant shops; English officials 
driving importantly in victorias, surely to pay dreadful 
calls of ceremony; women in gigantic hats, with 
Niagaras of veil, waving white gloves as they talked of 
— I guessed — the latest Cairene scandal. I perceived on 
the right hand and on the left waiters created in Switzer- 
land, hall porters made in Germany, Levantine touts, 
determined Jews holding false antiquities in their lean 
fingers, an English Baptist minister, in a white helmet, 
drinking chocolate on a terrace, with a guide-book in 
one fist, a ticket to visit monuments in the other. I 
heard Scottish soldiers playing, "I '11 be in Scotland 
before ye!" and something within me, a lurking hope, 
I suppose, seemed to founder and collapse — but only 
for a moment. It was after four in the afternoon. Soon 
day would be declining. And I seemed to remember 
that the decline of day in Egypt had moved me long 
ago — moved me as few, rare things have ever done. 
Within half an hour I was alone, far up the long road 
— Ismail's road — that leads from the suburbs of Cairo 
to the Pyramids. And then Egypt took me like a child 
by the hand and reassured me. 

It was the first week of November, high Nile had 
not subsided, and all the land here, between the river 
and the sand where the Sphinx keeps watch, was hidden 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

beneath the vast and tranquil waters of what seemed 
a tideless sea — a sea fringed with dense masses of date- 
palms, girdled in the far distance by palm-trees that 
looked almost black, broken by low and tiny islands 
on which palm-trees kept the white and the brown 
houses in their feathery embrace. Above these isolated 
houses pigeons circled. In the distance the lateen sails 
of boats ghded, sometimes behind the palms, coming 
into view, vanishing, mysteriously reappearing^ among 
their narrow trunks. Here and there a living thing 
moved slowly, wading homeward through this sea: a 
camel from the sands of Ghizeh, a buffalo, two donkeys, 
followed by boys who held with brown hands their 
dark blue skirts near their faces, a Bedouin leaning 
forward upon the neck of his quickly stepping horse. 
At one moment I seemed to look upon the lagoons of 
Venice, a watery vision full of a glassy calm. Then 
the palm-trees in the water, and growing to its edge, 
the pale sands that, far as the eyes could see, from 
Ghizeh to Sakkara and beyond, fringed it toward the 
west, made me think of the Pacific, of palmy islands 
of a paradise where men grow drowsy in well-being, 
and dream away the years. And then I looked still 
farther, beyond the pallid line of the sands, and I saw 
a Pyramid of gold, the wonder Khufu had built. As a 
golden wonder it saluted me after all my years of 
absence. Later I was to see it gray as gray sands, 
sulphur color in the afternoon from very near at hand, 

lO 



THE PYRAMIDS 

black as a monument draped in funereal velvet for a 
mourning under the stars at night, white as a monstrous 
marble tomb soon after dawn from the sand-dunes be- 
tween it and Sakkara. But as a golden thing it greeted 
me, as a golden miracle I shall remember it. 

Slowly the sun went down. The second Pyramid 
seemed also made of gold. Drowsily splendid it and 
its greater brother looked set on the golden sands be- 
neath the golden sky. And now the gold came travel- 
ing down from the desert to the water, turning it surely 
to a wine like the wine of gold that flowed down 
Midas' s throat; then, as the magic grew, to a Pactolus, 
and at last to a great surface that resembled golden ice, 
hard, glittering, unbroken by any ruffling wave. The 
islands rising from this golden ice were jet black, the 
houses black, the palms and their shadows that fell 
upon the marvel black. Black were the birds that flew 
low from roof to roof, black the wading camels, black 
the meeting leaves of the tall lebbek-trees that formed 
a tunnel from where I stood to Mena House. And 
presently a huge black Pyramid lay supine on the gold, 
and near it a shadowy brother seemed more humble than 
it, but scarcely less mysterious. The gold deepened, 
glowed more fiercely. In the sky above the Pyramids 
hung tiny cloud wreaths of rose red, delicate and airy as 
the gossamers of Tunis. As I turned, far off" in Cairo I 
saw the first lights glittering across the fields of doura, 
silvery white, like diamonds. But the silver did not 

13 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

call me. My imagination was held captive by the gold. 
I was summoned by the gold, and I went on, under 
the black lebbek-trees, on Ismail's road, toward it. 
And I dwelt in it many days. 

The wonders of Egypt man has made seem to in- 
crease in stature before the spirits' eyes as man learns 
to know them better, to tower up ever higher till the 
imagination is almost stricken by their looming great- 
ness. Climb the great Pyramid, spend a day with 
Abou on its summit, come down, penetrate into its re- 
cesses, stand in the king's chamber, listen to the silence 
there, feel it with your hands, — is it not tangible in this 
hot fastness of incorruptible death? — creep, like the 
surreptitious midget you feel yourself to be, up those 
long and steep inclines of polished stone, watching the 
bloomy darkness of the narrow walls, the far-off pin- 
point of light borne by the Bedouin who guides you, 
hear the twitter of the bats that have their dwelling in 
this monstrous gloom that man has made to shelter the 
thing whose ambition could never be embalmed, though 
that, of all its qualities, should have been given here, 
in the land it dowered, a life perpetual. Now you 
know the great Pyramid. You know that you can 
climb it, that you can enter it. You have seen it from 
all sides, under all aspects. It is familiar to you. 

No, it can never be that. With its more wonderful 
comrade, the Sphinx, it has the power peculiar, so it 
seems to me, to certain of the rock and stone monu- 

14 



THE PYRAMIDS 

ments of Egypt, of holding itself ever aloof, almost like 
the soul of man which can retreat at will, like the 
Bedouin retreating from you into the blackness of the 
Pyramid, far up, or far down, where the pursuing 
stranger, unaided, cannot follow. 



17 



II 

THE SPHINX 

ONE day at sunset I saw a bird trying to play 
with the Sphinx — a bird Hke a swallow, but 
with a ruddy brown on its breast, a gleam of 
blue somewhere on its wings. When I came to the 
edge of the sand basin where perhaps Khufu saw it 
lying nearly four thousand years before the birth of 
Christ, the Sphinx and the bird were quite alone. The 
bird flew near the Sphinx, whimsically turning this way 
and that, flying now low, now high, but ever returning 
to the magnet which drew it, which held it, from which 
it surely longed to extract some sign of recognition. It 
twittered, it poised itself in the golden air, with its 
bright eyes fixed upon those eyes of stone which gazed 
beyond it, beyond the land of Egypt, beyond the world 
of men, beyond the center of the sun to the last verges 
of eternity. And presently it alighted on the head of 
the Sphinx, then on its ear, then on its breast; and over 
the breast it tripped jerkily, with tiny, elastic steps, look- 
ing upward, its whole body quivering apparently with a 
desire for comprehension — a desire for some manifes- 
tation of friendship. Then suddenly it spread its wings 

18 



THE SPHINX 

and, straight as an arrow, it flew away over the sands 
and the waters toward the doura-fields and Cairo. 

And the sunset waned, and the afterglow flamed 
and faded, and the clear, soft African night fell. The 
pilgrims who day by day visit the Sphinx, like the 
bird, had gone back to Cairo. They had come, as the 
bird had come; as those who have conquered Egypt 
came; as the Greeks came, Alexander of Macedon, 
and the Ptolemies; as the Romans came; as the Mame- 
lukes, the Turks, the French, the English came. 

They had. come — and gone. 

And that enormous face, with the stains of stormy 
red still adhering to its cheeks, grew dark as the dark- 
ness closed in, turned brown as a fellah's face, as the 
face of that fellah who whispered his secret in the 
Sphinx's ear, but learnt no secret in return; turned 
black almost as a Nubian's face. The night accentuated 
its appearance of terrible repose, of superhuman indif- 
ference to whatever might befall. In the night I seemed 
to hear the footsteps of the dead — of all the dead war- 
riors and the steeds they rode, defiling over the sand 
before the unconquerable thing they perhaps thought 
that they had conquered. At last the footsteps died 
away. There was a silence. Then, coming down from 
the Great Pyramid, surely I heard the light patter of a 
donkey's feet. They went to the Sphinx and ceased. 
The silence was profound. And I remembered the 
legend that Mary, Joseph, and the Holy Child once 

21 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

halted here on their long journey, and that Mary laid 
the tired Christ between the paws of the Sphinx to 
sleep. Yet even of the Christ the soul within that body 
could take no heed at all. 

/ It is, I think, one of the most astounding facts in the 
history of man that a man was able to contain within 
his mind, to conceive, the conception of the Sphinx. 
That he could carry it out in the stone is amazing. But 
how much more amazing it is that before there was the 
Sphin^ he was able to see it with his imagination! One 
may criticize the Sphinx. One may say impertinent 
things that are true about it: that seen from behind at 
a distance its head looks like an enormous mushroom 
growing in the sand, that its cheeks are swelled inordi- 
nately, that its thick-lipped mouth is legal, that from 
certain places it bears a resemblance to a prize bull- 
dog:. All this does not matter at all. What does 
matter is that into the conception and execution of the 
Sphinx has been poured a supreme imaginative power. 
He who created it looked beyond Egypt, beyond the 
life of man. He grasped the conception of Eternity, 
and realized the nothingness of Time, and he rendered 
it in stone. 

I can imagine the most determined atheist looking 
at the Sphinx and, in a flash, not merely believing, but 
feeling that he had before him proof of the life of the 
soul beyond the grave, of the life of the soul of Khufu 
beyond the tomb of his Pyramid. Always as you re- 

22 



THE SPHINX 

turn to the Sphinx you wonder at it more, you adore 
more strangely its repose, you steep yourself more in- 
timately in the aloof peace that seems to emanate from 
it as light emanates from the sun. And as you look on 
it at last perhaps you understand the infinite; you un- 
derstand where is the bourne to which the finite flows 
with all its greatness, as the great Nile flows from be- 
yond Victoria Nyanza to the sea. 

And as the wonder of the Sphinx takes possession 
of you gradually, so gradually do you learn to feel the 
majesty of the Pyramids of Ghizeh. Unlike the Step 
Pyramid of Sakkara, which, even when one is near it, 
looks like a small mountain, part of the land on which 
it rests; the Pyramids of Ghizeh look what they are — 
artificial excrescences, invented and carried out by man, 
expressions of man's greatness. Exquisite as they are 
as features of the drowsy golden landscape at the set- 
ting of the sun, I think they look most wonderful at 
night, when they are black beneath the stars. On many 
nights I have sat in the sand at a distance and looked 
at them, and always, and increasingly, they have stirred 
my imagination. Their profound calm, their classical 
simplicity, are greatly emphasized when no detail can 
be seen, when they are but black shapes towering to the 
stars. They seem to aspire then like prayers prayed 
by one who has said, "God does not need my prayers, 
but I need them." In their simplicity they suggest a 
crowd of thoughts, and of desires. Guy de Maupassant 

23 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

has said that of all the arts architecture is perhaps the 
most esthetic, the most mysterious, and the most 
nourished by ideas. How true this is you feel as you 
look at the Great Pyramid by night. It seems to 
breathe out mystery. The immense base recalls to you 
the labyrinth within ; the long descent from the tiny slit 
that gives you entrance, your uncertain steps in its hot, 
eternal night, your falls on the ice-hke surfaces of its 
polished blocks of stone, the crushing weight that seemed 
to lie on your heart as you stole uncertainly on, sum- 
moned almost as by the desert; your sensation of being 
forever imprisoned, taken and hidden by a monster from 
Egypt's wonderful light, as you stood in the central 
chamber, and realized the stone ocean into whose 
depths, like some intrepid diver, you had dared delib- 
erately to come. And then your eyes travel up the 
slowly shrinking walls till they reach the dark point 
which is the top. There you stood with Abou, who 
spends half his life on the highest stone, hostages of 
the sun, bathed in light and air that perhaps came to 
you from the Gold Coast. And you saw men and 
camels like flies, and Cairo like a gray blur, and the 
Mokattam hills almost as a higher ridge of the sands. 
The mosque of Mohammed Ali was like a cup turned 
over. Far below slept the dead in that graveyard of the 
Sphinx, with its pale stones, its sand, its palm, its "Syca- 
mores of the South," once worshiped and regarded as 
Hathor's living body. And beyond them on one side 

24 



THE SPHINX 

were the sleeping waters, with islands small, surely, as 
delicate Egyptian hands, and on the other the great 
desert that stretches, so the Bedouins say, on and on 
"for a march of a thousand days." 

That base and that summit — what suggestion and 
what mystery in their contrast! What sober, eternal 
beauty in the dark line which unites them, now sharply, 
yet softly, defined against the night, which is purple as 
the one garment of the fellah! That line leads the soul 
irresistibly from earth to the stars. 



27 



Ill 

SAKKARA 

IT was the "Little Christmas" of the Egyptians as 
I rode to Sakkara, after seeing a wonderful feat, 
the ascent and descent of the second Pyramid 
in nineteen minutes by a young Bedouin called Mo- 
hammed Ali, who very seriously informed me that the 
only Roumi who had ever reached the top was an 
"American gentlemens" called Mark Twain, on his first 
visit to Egypt. On his second visit, Ali said, Mr. 
Twain had a bad foot, and declared he could not be 
bothered with the second Pyramid. He had been up 
and down it once without a guide ; he had disturbed the 
jackal which lives near its summit, and which I saw 
running in the sunshine as Ali drew near its lair, and he 
was satisfied to rest on his immortal laurels. To the 
Bedouins of the Pyramids Mark Twain's world-wide 
celebrity is owing to one fact alone: he is the only 
Roumi who has climbed the second Pyramid. That is 
why his name is known to every one. 

It was the " Little Christmas," and from the villages 
in the plain the Egyptians came pouring out to visit 

28 



SAKKARA 

their dead in the desert cemeteries as I passed by to 
visit the dead in the tombs far off on the horizon. 
Women, swathed in black, gathered in groups and 
jumped monotonously up and down, to the accompani- 
ment of stained hands clapping, and strange and weary 
songs. Tiny children blew furiously into tin trumpets, 
emitting sounds that were terribly European. Men 
strode seriously by, or stood in knots among the 
graves, talking vivaciously of the things of this life. 
As the sun rose higher in the heavens, this visit to the 
dead became a carnival of the living. Laughter and 
shrill cries of merriment betokened the resignation of 
the mourners. The sand-dunes were black with run- 
ning figures, racing, leaping, chasing one another, roll- 
ing over and over in the warm and golden grains. 
Some sat among the graves and ate. Some sang. 
Some danced. I saw no one praying, after the sun 
was up. The Great Pyramid of Ghizeh was trans- 
formed in this morning hour, and gleamed like a marble 
mountain, or like the hill covered with salt at El- 
Outaya, in Algeria. As we went on it sank down into 
the sands, until at last I could see only a small section 
with its top, which looked almost as pointed as a 
gigantic needle. Abou was there on the hot stones in 
the golden eye of the sun — Abou who lives to respect 
his Pyramid, and to serve Turkish coffee to those who 
are determined enough to climb it. Before me the 
Step Pyramid rose, brown almost as bronze, out of the 

31 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

sands here desolate and pallid. Soon I was in the 
house of Marriette, between the little sphinxes. 

Near Cairo, although the desert is real desert, it 
does not give, to me, at any rate, the immense im- 
pression of naked sterility, of almost brassy, sunbaked 
fierceness, which often strikes one in the Sahara to the 
south of Algeria, where at midday one sometimes has 
a feeling of being lost upon a waste of metal, gleaming, 
angry, tigerish in color. Here, in Egypt, both the 
people and the desert seem gentler, safer, more amiable. 
Yet these tombs of Sakkara are hidden in a desolation 
of the sands, peculiarly blanched and mournful ; and as 
you wander from tomb to tomb, descending and ascend- 
ing, stealing through great galleries beneath the sands, 
creeping through tubes of stone, crouching almost on 
hands and knees in the sultry chambers of the dead, the 
awfulness of the passing away of dynasties and of races 
comes, like a cloud, upon your spirit. But this cloud 
lifts and floats from you in the cheerful tomb of Thi, 
that royal councilor, that scribe and confidant, whose 
life must have been passed in a round of serene ac- 
tivities, amid a sneering, though doubtless admiring, 
population. 

Into this tomb of white, vivacious figures, gay al- 
most, though never wholly frivolous, for these men 
were full of purpose, full of an ardor that seduces even 
where it seems grotesque, I took with me a child of ten 
called Ali, from the village of Kafiah; and as I looked 

32 



SAKKARA 

from him to the walls around us, rather than the pass- 
ing away of the races, I realized the persistence of type. 
For everywhere I saw the face of little Ali, with every 
feature exactly reproduced. Here he was bending over 
a sacrifice, leading a sacred bull, feeding geese from a 
cup, roasting a chicken, pulling a boat, carpentering, pol- 
ishing, conducting a monkey for a walk, or merely sit- 
ting bolt upright and sneering. There were lines of 
little Alis with their hands held to their breasts, their 
faces in profile, their knees rigid, in the happy tomb of 
Thi; but he glanced at them unheeding, did not rec- 
ognize his ancestors. And he did not care to pene- 
trate into the tombs of Mera and Meri-Ra-ankh, into 
the Serapeum and the Mestaba of Ptah-hotep. Per- 
haps he was right. The Serapeum is grand in its vast- 
ness, with its long and high galleries and its mighty 
vaults containing the huge granite sarcophagi of the 
sacred bulls of Apis ; Mera, red and white, welcomes 
you from an elevated niche benignly; Ptah-hotep, 
priest of the fifth dynasty, receives you, seated at a 
table that resembles a rake with long, yellow teeth 
standing on its handle, and drinking stiffly a cup of 
wine. You see upon the wall near by, with sympathy, 
a patient being plied by a naked and evidently an un- 
yielding physician with medicine from a jar that might 
have been visited by Morgiana, a musician playing 
upon an instrument like a huge and stringless harp. 
But it is the happy tomb of Thi that lingers in your 

35 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

memory. In that tomb one sees proclaimed with a 
marvelous ingenuity and expressiveness the joy and 
the activity of life. , Thi must have loved life ; loved 
prayer and sacrifice, loved sport and war, loved feasting 
and gaiety, labor of the hands and of the head, loved 
the arts, the music of flute and harp, singing by the 
lingering and plaintive voices which seem to express 
the essence of the East, loved sweet odors, loved sweet 
women, — do we not see him sitting to receive offerings 
with his wife beside him? — loved the clear nights and 
the radiant days that in Egypt make glad the heart of 
man. He must have loved the splendid gift of life, and 
used it completely^ And so little Ali did very right to 
make his sole obeisance at Thi's delicious tomb, from 
which death itself seems banished by the soft and em- 
bracing radiance of the almost living walls. 

This delicate cheerfulness, a quite airy gaiety of life, 
is often combined in Egypt, and most beautifully and 
happily combined, with tremendous solidity, heavy im- 
pressiveness, a hugeness that is well-nigh tragic ; and 
it supplies a relief to eye, to mind, to soul, that is sweet 
and refreshing as the trickle of a tarantella from a reed 
flute heard under the shadows of a temple of Hercules. 
Life showers us with contrasts. Art, which gives to 
us a second and a more withdrawn life, opening to us 
a door through which we pass to our dreams, may well 
imitate life in this. 



36 



IV 

ABYDOS 



r I THROUGH a long and golden noontide, and on 
I into an afternoon whose opulence of warmth 

-^ and light it seemed could never wane, I sat 
alone, or wandered gently quite alone, in the Temple 
of Seti I at Abydos. Here again I was in a place of 
the dead. In Egypt one ever seeks the dead in the 
sunshine, black vaults in the land of the gold. But 
here in Abydos I was companioned by whiteness. The 
general effect of Seti's mighty temple is that it is a 
white temple when seen in full sunshine and beneath 
a sky of blinding blue. In an arid place it stands, just 
beyond an Egyptian village that is a maze of dust, of 
children, of animals, and ilies. The last blind houses 
of the village, brown as brown paper, confront it on a 
mound, and as I came toward it a girl-child swathed in 
purple, with ear-rings, and a twist of orange handker- 
chief above her eyes, full of cloud and fire, leaned 
from a roof, sinuously as a young snake, to watch me. 
On each side, descending, were white, ruined walls, 
stretched out like defaced white arms of the temple to 
receive me. I stood still for a moment and looked at 

37 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

the narrow, severely simple doorway, at the twelve 
broken columns advanced on either side, white and 
grayish white with their right angles, their once painted 
figures now almost wholly colorless. 

Here lay the Osirians, those blessed dead of the land 
of Egypt, who worshiped the Judge of the Dead, the 
Lord of the Underworld, and who hoped for immortal- 
ity through him — Osiris, husband of Isis, Osiris, re- 
ceiver of prayers, Osiris the sun who will not be con- 
quered by night, but eternally rises again, and so is the 
symbol of the resurrection of the soul. It is said that 
Set, the power of Evil, tore the body of Osiris into 
fourteen fragments and scattered them over the land. 
But multitudes of worshipers of Osiris believed him 
buried near Abydos and, like those who loved the 
sweet songs of Hafiz, they desired to be buried near 
him whom they adored; and so this place became a 
place of the dead, a place of many prayers, a white 
place of many longings. 

I was glad to be alone there. The guardian left me 
in perfect peace. I happily forgot him. I sat down in 
the shadow of a column upon its mighty projecting 
base. The sky was blinding blue. Great bees hummed, 
like bourdons, through the silence, deepening the al- 
most heavy calm. These columns, architraves, door- 
ways, how mighty, how grandly strong they were! 
And yet soon I began to be aware that even here', 
where surely one should read only the Book of the Dead, 

38 




§s^3r; 



ABYDOS 

or bend down to the hot ground to Hsten if perchance 
one might hear the dead themselves murmuring over 
the chapters of Beatification far down in their hidden 
tombs, there was a Hghtness, a gentle gaiety of life, as 
in the tomb of Thi. The effect of solidity was im- 
mense. These columns bulged, almost like great fruits 
swollen out by their heady strength of blood. They 
towered up in crowds. The heavy roof, broken in 
places most mercifully to show squares and oblongs of 
that perfect, calling blue, was like a frowning brow. 
And yet I was with grace, with gentleness, with light- 
ness, because in the place of the dead I was again with 
the happy, living walls. Above me, on the roof, there 
was a gleam of palest blue, like the blue I have some- 
times seen at morning on the Ionian sea just where it 
meets the shore. The double rows of gigantic columns 
stretched away, tall almost as forest trees, to right of 
me and to left, and were shut in by massive walls, 
strong as the walls of a fortress. And on these col- 
umns, and on these walls, dead painters and gravers 
had breathed the sweet breath of life. Here in the 
sun, for me alone, as it seemed, a population followed 
their occupations. Men walked, and kneeled, and 
stood, some white and clothed, some nude, some red as 
the red man's child that leaped beyond the sea. And 
here was the lotus-flower held in reverent hands, not 
the rose-lotus, but the blossom that typified the rising 
again of the sun, and that, worn as an amulet, signified 

41 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

the gift of eternal youth. And here was hawk-faced 
Horus, and here a priest offering sacrifice to a god, be- 
lief in whom has long since passed away. A king re- 
vealed himself to me, adoring Ptah, "Father of the 
beginnings," who established upon earth, my figures 
thought, the everlasting justice, and again at the knees 
of Amen burning incense in his honor. Isis and Osiris 
stood together, and sacrifice was made before their 
sacred bark. And Seti worshiped them, and Seshta, 
goddess of learning, wrote in the book of eternity the 
name of the king. 

The great bees hummed, moving slowly in the 
golden air among the mighty columns, passing slowly 
among these records of lives long over, but which 
seemed still to be. And I looked at the lotus-flowers 
which the little grotesque hands were holding, had been 
holding for how many years — the flowers that typified 
the rising again of the sun and the divine gift of eternal 
youth. And I thought of the bird and the Sphinx, jthe 
thing that was whimsical wooing the thing that was 
mighty. And I gazed at the immense columns and at 
the light and little figures all about me. Bird and 
Sphinx, delicate whimsicality, calm and terrific power! 
In Egypt the dead men have combined them, and the 
combination has an irresistible fascination, weaves a 
spell that entrances you in the sunshine and beneath 
the blinding blue. At Abydos I knew it. And I 
loved the columns that seemed blown out with ex- 

42 



ABYDOS 

uberant strength, and I loved the dehcate white walls 
that, like the lotus-flower, give to the world a youth 
that seems eternal — a youth that is never frivolous, but 
that is full of the divine, and yet pathetic, animation of 
happy life. 

The great bees hummed more drowsily. I sat quite 
still in the sun. And then presently, moved by some 
prompting instinct, I turned my head, and, far off, 
through the narrow portal of the temple, I saw the girl- 
child swathed in purple still lying, sinuously as a 
young snake, upon the palm-wood roof above the 
brown earth wall to watch me with her eyes of cloud 
and fire. 

And upon me, like cloud and fire — cloud of the 
tombs and the great temple columns, fire of the brilliant 
life painted and engraved upon them, there stole the 
spell of Egypt. 



45 



V 

THE NILE 

I DO not find in Egypt any more the strangeness 
that once amazed, and at first ahuost bewildered 
me. Stranger far is Morocco, stranger the coun- 
try beyond Biskra, near Mogar, round Touggourt, 
even about EI Kantara. There I feel very far away, 
as a child feels distance from dear, familiar things. I 
look to the horizon expectant of I know not what 
magical occurrences, what mysteries. I am aware of 
the summons to advance to marvelous lands, where 
marvelous things must happen. I am taken by that 
sensation of almost trembling magic which came to me 
when first I saw a mirage far out in the Sahara. But 
Egypt, though it contains so many marvels, has no 
longer for me the marvelous atmosphere. Its keynote 
is seductiveness. 

In Egypt one feels very safe. Smiling policemen in 
clothes of spotless white — emblematic, surely, of their 
innocence ! — seem to be everywhere, standing calmly 
in the sun. Very gentle, very tender, although per- 
haps not very true, are the Bedouin at the Pyramids. 
Up the Nile the fellaheen smile as kindly as the police- 

46 



^'^T"- f 




THE NILE 

men, smile protectingly upon you, as if they would say, 
" Allah has placed us here to take care of the confiding 
stranger." No ferocious demands for money fall upon 
my ears ; only an occasional suggestion is subtly con- 
veyed to me that even the poor must live and that I 
am immensely rich. An amiable, an almost enticing 
seductiveness seems emanating from the fertile soil, 
shining in the golden air, gleaming softly in the amber 
sands, dimpling in the brown, the mauve, the silver 
eddies of the Nile. It steals upon one. It ripples over 
one. It laps one as if with warm and scented waves. 
A sort of lustrous languor overtakes one. In physi- 
cal well-being one sinks down, and with wide eyes one 
gazes and listens and enjoys, and thinks not of the 
morrow. 

The dahabiyeh — her very name, the Loulia, has a 
gentle, seductive, cooing sound — drifts broadside to the 
current with furled sails, or glides smoothly on before 
an amiable north wind with sails unfurled. Upon the 
bloomy banks, rich brown in color, the brown men 
stoop, and straighten themselves, and stoop again, and 
sing. The sun gleams on their copper skins, which 
look polished and metallic. Crouched in his net be- 
hind the drowsy oxen, the little boy circles the live- 
long day with the sakieh. And the sakieh raises its 
wailing, wayward voice and sings to the shadoof; and 
the shadoof sings to the sakieh ; and the lifted water 
falls and flows away into the green wilderness of doura 

49 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

that, like a miniature forest, spreads on every hand to 
the low mountains, which do not perturb the spirit, as 
do the iron mountains of Algeria. And always the 
sun is shining, and the body is drinking in its warmth, 
and the soul is drinking in its gold. And always the 
ears are full of warm and drowsy and monotonous 
music. And always the eyes see the lines of brown 
bodies, on the brown river-banks above the brown 
waters, bending, straightening, bending, straightening, 
with an exquisitely precise monotony. And always 
the Loiilia seems to be drifting, so quietly she slips 
up, or down, the level waterway. 

And one drifts, too; one can but drift, happily, 
sleepily, forgetting every care. From Abydos to Den- 
derah one drifts, and from Denderah to Karnak, to 
Luxor, to all the marvels on the western shore; and on 
to Edfu, to Kom Ombos, to Assuan, and perhaps even 
into Nubia, to Abu-Simbel and to Wadi-Halfa. Life 
on the Nile is a long dream, golden and sweet as 
honey of Hymettus. For I let the "divine serpent," 
who at Philae may be seen issuing from her charmed 
cavern, take me very quietly to see the abodes of the 
dead, the halls of the vanished, upon her green and 
sterile shores. I know nothing of the bustling, shriek- 
ing steamer that defies her, churning into angry waves 
her waters for the edification of those who would "do" 
Egypt and be gone before they know her. 

If you are in a hurry, do not come to Egypt. To 

50 



THE NILE 

hurry in Egypt is as wrong as to fall asleep in Wall 
Street, or to sit in the Greek Theater at Taormina, 
reading "How to Make a Fortune with a Capital of 
Fifty Pounds." 



51 



VI 
DENDERAH 

FROM Abydos, home of the cult of Osiris, judge 
of the dead, I came to Denderah, the great 
temple of the "Lady of the Underworld," as 
the goddess Hathor was sometimes called, though she 
was usually worshiped as the Egyptian Aphrodite, 
goddess of joy, goddess of love and loveliness. It was 
early morning when I went ashore. The sun was 
above the eastern hills, and a boy, clad in a rope of 
plaited grass, sent me half shyly the greeting, "May 
your day be happy!" 

Youth is, perhaps, the most divine of all the gifts of 
the gods, as those who wore the lotus-blossom amulet 
believed thousands of years ago, and Denderah, ap- 
propriately, is a very young Egyptian temple, probably, 
indeed, the youngest of all the temples on the Nile. 
Its youthfulness — it is only about two thousand years 
of age — identifies it happily with the happiness and 
beauty of its presiding deity, and as I rode toward it 
on the canal-bank in the young freshness of the morn- 
ing, I thought of the goddess Safekh and of the sacred 
Persea-tree. When Safekh inscribed upon a leaf of 

52 




^^ 



DENDERAH 

the Persea-tree the name of king or conqueror, he 
gained everlasting Hfe. Was it the Hfe of youth? An 
everlasting life of middle age might be a doubtful bene- 
fit. And then mentally I added, " unless one lived in 
Egypt." For here the years drop from one, and every 
golden hour brings to one surely another drop of the 
wondrous essence that sets time at defiance and charms 
sad thoughts away. 

Unlike White Abydos, White Denderah stands 
apart from habitations, in a still solitude upon a 
blackened mound. From far off I saw the fagade, 
large, bare, and sober, rising, in a nakedness as com- 
plete as that of Aphrodite rising from the wave, out of 
the plain of brown, alluvial soil that was broken here 
and there by a sharp green of growing things. There 
was something of sadness in the scene, and again I 
thought of Hathor as the "Lady of the Underworld," 
some deep-eyed being, with a pale brow, hair like the 
night, and yearning, wistful hands stretched out in sup- 
plication. There was a hush upon this place. The 
loud and vehement cry of the. shadoof-man died away. 
The sakieh droned in my ears no more like distant 
Sicilian pipes playing at Natale. I felt a breath from 
the desert. And, indeed, the desert was near — that 
realistic desert which suggests to the traveler ap- 
proaches to the sea, so that beyond each pallid dune, as 
he draws near it, he half expects to hear the lapping of 
the waves. Presently, when, having ascended that 

55 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

marvelous staircase of the New Year, walking in pro- 
cession with the priests upon its walls toward the rays 
of Ra, I came out upon the temple roof, and looked 
upon the desert — upon sheeny sands, almost like slopes 
of satin shining in the sun, upon paler sands in the 
distance, holding an Arab campo saiito, in which rose 
the little creamy cupolas of a sheik's tomb, surrounded 
by a creamy wall, those little cupolas gave to me a 
feeling of the real, the irresistible Africa such as I had 
not known since I had been in Egypt; and I thought 
I heard in the distance the ceaseless hum of praying 
and praising voices. 

"God hath rewarded the faithful with gardens 
through which flow rivulets. They shall be forever 
therein, and that is the reward of the virtuous." 

The sensation of solemnity which overtook me as I 
approached the temple deepened when I drew close to 
it, when I stood within it. In the first hall, mighty, 
magnificent, full of enormous columns from which faces 
of Hathor once looked to the four points of the compass, 
I found only one face almost complete, saved from the 
fury of fanatics by the protection of the goddess of 
chance, in whom the modern Egyptian so implicitly be- 
lieves. In shape it was a delicate oval. In the long 
eyes, about the brow, the cheeks, there was a strained 
expression that suggested to me more than a gravity — 
almost an anguish — of spirit. As I looked at it, I 
thought of Eleanora Duse. Was this the ideal of joy 

56 



DENDERAH 

in the time of the Ptolemies ? Joy may be rapturous, 
or it may be serene; but could it ever be like this? The 
pale, delicious blue that here and there, in tiny sections, 
broke the almost haggard, grayish whiteness of this 
first hall with the roof of black, like bits of an evening 
sky seen through tiny window-slits in a somber room, 
suggested joy, was joy summed up in color. But 
Hathor's face was weariful and sad. 

From the sfloom of the inner halls came a sound, 
loud, angry, menacing, as I walked on, a sound of 
menace and an odor, heavy and deathlike. Only in the 
first hall had those builders and decorators of two 
thousand years ago been moved by their conception of 
the goddess to hail her, to worship her, with the purity 
of white, with the sweet gaiety of turquoise. Or so it 
seems to-day, when the passion of Christianity against 
Hathor has spent itself and died. Now Christians 
come to seek what Christian Copts destroyed; wander 
through the deserted courts, desirous of looking upon 
the faces that have long since been hacked to pieces. 
A more benign spirit informs our world, but, alas! 
Hathor has been sacrificed to the devilries of old. And 
it is well, perhaps, that her temple should be sad, like 
a place of silent waiting for the glories that are gone. 

With every step my melancholy grew. Encompassed 
by gloomy odors, assailed by the clamor of gigantic 
bats, which flew furiously among the monstrous pillars 
near a roof ominous as a storm-cloud, my spirit was 

59 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

haunted by the sad eyes of Hathor, which gaze forever 
from that column in the first hall. Were they always 
like that? Once that face dwelt with a crowd of other 
faces, looked upon a glory of worship. And all the 
other faces have gone, and all the glory has passed. 
And, like so many of the living, the goddess has paid 
for her splendors. The pendulum swung, and where 
men adored, men hated her — her the goddess of love 
and loveliness. And as the human face changes when 
terror and sorrow come, I felt as if Hathor' s face of 
stone had changed upon its column, looking toward 
the Nile, in obedience to the anguish in her heart; I 
felt as if Denderah Avere a majestic house of grief. So 
I must always think of it, dark, tragic, and superb. 
The Egyptians once believed that when death came to 
a man, the soul of him, which they called the Ba, 
winged its way to the gods, but that, moved by a sweet 
unselfishness, it returned sometime to his tomb, to give 
comfort to the poor, deserted mummy. Upon the lids 
of sarcophagi it is sometimes represented as a' bird, 
flying down to, or resting upon, the mummy. As I 
went onward in the darkness, among the columns, over 
the blocks of stone that form the pavements, seeing 
vaguely the sacred boats upon the walls, Horus and 
Thoth, the kins^ before Osiris; as I mounted and de- 
scended with the priests to roof and floor, I longed, 
instead of the clamor of the bats, to hear the light 
flutter of the soft wings of the Ba of Hathor, flying 

60. 







^r> 



DENDERAH 

from Paradise to this sad temple of the desert to bring 
her comfort in the gloom. I thought of her as a poor 
woman, suffering as only women can in loneliness. 

In the museum at Cairo there is the mummy of "the 
lady Amanit, priestess of Hathor." She lies there 
upon her back, with her thin body slightly turned to- 
ward the left side, as if in an effort to change her posi- 
tion. Her head is completely turned to the same side. 
Her mouth is wide open, showing all the teeth. The 
tongue is lolling out. Upon the head the thin, brown 
hair makes a line above the little ear, and is minsjled at 
the back of the head with false tresses. Round the 
neck is a mass of ornaments, of amulets and beads. 
The right arm and hand lie along the body. The ex- 
pression of "the lady Amanit" is very strange, and 
very subtle; for it combines horror — which implies 
activity — with a profound, an impenetrable repose, far 
beyond the reach of all disturbance. In the temple of 
Denderah I fancied the lady Amanit ministering sadly, 
even terribly, to a lonely goddess, moving in fear 
through an eternal gloom, dying at last there, over- 
whelmed by tasks too heavy for that tiny body, 
the ultra-sensitive spirit that inhabited it. And now 
she sleeps — one feels that, as one gazes at the mummy 
— very profoundly, though not yet very calmly, the 
lady Amanit. But her goddess — still she wakes upon 
her column. 

When I came out at last into the sunlight of the 
6; 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

growing day, I circled the temple, skirting its gigantic, 
corniced walls, from which at intervals the heads and 
paws of resting lions protrude, to see another woman 
whose fame for loveliness and seduction is almost as 
legendary as Aphrodite's. It is fitting enough that 
Cleopatra's form should be graven upon the temple of 
Hathor; fitting, also, that though I found her in the 
presence of deities, and in the company of her son, 
Caesarion, her face, which is in profile, should have 
nothing of Hathor's sad impressiveness. This, no 
doubt, is not the real Cleopatra. Nevertheless, this 
face suggests a certain self-complacent cruelty and 
sensuality essentially human, and utterly detached from 
all divinity, whereas in the face of the goddess there is 
a something remote, and even distantly intellectual, 
which calls the imagination to "the fields beyond." 

As I rode back toward the river, I saw again the 
boy clad in the rope of plaited grass, and again he said, 
less shyly, "May your day be happy!" It was a kindly 
wish. In the dawn I had felt it to be almost a prophecy. 
But now I was haunted by the face of the goddess of 
Denderah, and I remembered the legend of the lovely 
Lais, who, when she began to age, covered herself from 
the eyes of men with a veil, and went every day at 
evening to look upon her statue, in which the genius 
of Praxiteles had rendered permanent the beauty the 
woman could not keep. One evening, hanging to the 
statue's pedestal by a garland of red roses, the sculptor 

64 



DENDERAH 

found a mirror, upon the polished disk of which were 
traced these words: 

"Lais, O Goddess, consecrates to thee her mirror: 
no longer able to see there what she was, she will not 
see there what she has become." 

My Hathor of Denderah, the sad-eyed dweller on 
the column in the first hall, had she a mirror, would 
surely hang it, as Lais hung hers, at the foot of the 
pedestal of the Egyptian Aphrodite; had she a veil, 
would surely cover the face that, solitary among the 
cruel evidences of Christian ferocity, silently says to 
the gloomy courts, to the shining desert and the Nile: 

"Once I was worshiped, but I am worshiped no 
loneer." 



65 



VII 
KARNAK 

BUILDINGS have personalities. Some fasci- 
, nate as beautiful women fascinate; some charm 
as a child may charm, naively, simply, but irre- 
sistibly. Some, like conquerors, men of blood and iron, 
without bowels of mercy, pitiless and determined, strike 
awe to the soul, mingled with the almost gasping ad- 
miration that power wakes in man. Some bring a 
sense of heavenly peace to the heart. Some, like cer- 
tain temples of the Greeks, by their immense dignity, 
speak to the nature almost as music speaks, and change 
anxiety to trust. Some tug at the hidden chords of 
romance and rouse a trembling response. Some seem 
to be mingling their tears with the tears of the dead ; 
some their laughter with the laughter of the living. 
The traveler, sailing up the Nile, holds intercourse with 
many of these different personalities. He is sad, per- 
haps, as I was with Denderah; dreams in the sun with 
Abydos; muses with Luxor beneath the little, tapering 
minaret whence the call to prayer drops down to be 
answered by the angelus bell; falls into a reverie in 

66 



KARNAK 

the "thinking place" of Rameses II, near to the giant 
that was once the mightiest of all Egyptian statues; 
eagerly wakes to the fascination of record at Deir-el- 
Bahari; worships in Edfu; by Philas is carried into a 
realm of delicate magic, where engineers are not. 
Each prompts him to a different mood; each wakes in 
his nature a different response. And at Karnak what 
is he? What mood enfolds him there? Is he sad, 
thoughtful, awed, or gay? 

An old lady, in a helmet and other things considered 
no doubt by her as suited to Egypt rather than to her- 
self, remarked in my hearing, with a Scotch accent and 
an air of summing up, that Karnak was "very nice in- 
deed." There she was wrong — Scotch and wrong. 
Karnak is not nice. No temple that I have seen upjon 
the banks of the Nile is nice. And Karnak cannot be 
summed up in a phrase or in many phrases; cannot 
even be adequately described in few or many words. 

Long ago I saw it lighted up with colored fires one 
night for the khedive, its ravaged magnificence tinted 
with rose and livid green and blue, its pylons glitter- 
ing with artificial gold, its population of statues, its 
obelisks, and columns, changing from things of dream 
to things of day, from twilight marvels to shadowy 
specters, and from these to hard and piercing realities 
at the cruel will of pigmies crouching by its walls. 
Now, after many years, I saw it first quietly by moon- 
light after watching the sunset from the summit of the 

69 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

great pylon. That was a pageant worth more than the 
khedive's. 

I was in the air; had something of the released feel- 
ing I have often known upon the tower of Biskra, look- 
ing out toward evening to the Sahara spaces. But 
here I was not confronted with an immensity of nature, 
but with a gleaming river and an immensity of man. 
Beneath me was the native village, in the heart of day- 
light dusty and unkempt, but now becoming charged 
with velvety beauty, with the soft and heavy mystery 
that at evening is born among great palm-trees. Along 
the path that led from it, coming toward the avenue 
of sphinxes with ram's-heads that watch forever be- 
fore the temple door, a great white camel stepped, its 
rider a tiny child with a close, white cap upon his head. 
The child was singing to the glory of the sunset, or 
was it to the glory of Amun, "the hidden one," once 
the local god of Thebes, to whom the grandest temple 
in the world was dedicated? I listened to the childish, 
quavering voice, twittering almost like a bird, and one 
word alone came up to me — the word one hears in 
Egypt from all the lips that speak and sing: from the 
Nubians round their fires at night, from the lithe boat- 
men of the lower reaches of the Nile, from the Bedouins 
of the desert, and the donkey boys of the villages, 
from the sheik who reads one's future in water spilt on 
a plate, and the Bisharin with buttered curls who runs 
to sell one beads from his tent among the sand-dunes. 

70 



'#■ 



KARNAK 

"Allah!" the child was singing as he passed upon 
his way. 

Pigeons circled above their pretty towers. The bats 
came out, as if they knew how precious is their black 
at evening against the ethereal lemon color, the orange, 
and the red. The little obelisk beyond the last sphinx 
on the left began to change, as in Egypt all things 
change at sunset — pylon and dusty bush, colossus 
and baked earth hovel, sycamore, and tamarisk, statue 
and trotting donkey. It looked like a mysterious 
finger pointed in warning toward the sky. The Nile 
began to gleam. Upon its steel and silver torches of 
amber flame were lighted. The Libyan mountains be- 
came spectral beyond the tombs of the kings. The 
tiny, rough cupolas that mark a grave close to the 
sphinxes, in daytime dingy and poor, now seemed made 
of some splendid material worthy to roof the mummy 
of a king. Far off a pool of the Nile, that from here 
looked like a little palm-fringed lake, turned ruby red. 
The flags from the standards of Luxor, among the 
minarets, flew out straight against a sky that was pale 
as a primrose, almost cold in its amazing delicacy. 

I turned, and behind me the moon was risen. Al- 
ready its silver rays fell upon the ruins of Karnak; 
upon the thickets of lotus columns ; upon solitary gate- 
ways that now give entrance to no courts ; upon the 
sacred lake, with its reeds, where the black water-fowl 
were asleep; upon sloping walls, shored up by enor- 



EGYPT AND JTS MOxMUMi^NTS 

mous stanchions, like ribs of some prehistoric leviathan; 
uj;on small chamhers; ujjon fallen blocks of masonry, 
fragments of architrave and pavement, of capital and 
cornice; and upon the people of Karnak — those fascin- 
ating peofjle whr; still clin^ to their habitation in the 
ruins, f;i.itlifiil through misfortune, affectionate with a 
steadfastness that defies the cruelty of time; upon the 
little, lonely white sphinx with the woman's face and the 
downward-slf;j;in^ eyes full of sleepy seduction; upon 
Kaineses 11, with the face of a kindly child, not of a 
king; upon the sphin'x, bereft of its companion, which 
crouches before the kiosk of Taharga, the king of 
Kthif;pia; upon tliose Uvo who stand together as if de- 
voted, yet by their attitudes seem to express characters 
di;uiietrieally opposed, gray men and vivid, the one 
with folded anns calling to ]^:aee, the other with arms 
stretched down in a gesture of crude determination, 
summoning War, as if from the under-world; upon the 
granite fof;t and ankle in the temple of Rameses III, 
which in their perfection, like the headless Victory in 
Paris, and the Niobide Chiaramonti in the Vatican, sug- 
gest a great jjersonality, compose a great personality 
that once met with is ntjt to be forgotten : upon these and 
their companions, who would not forsake the halls and 
cfjurts where once they dwelt with splendor, where 
now tiiey dwell with ruin that attracts the gaping 
world. The moon was risen, but the west was still 
full of color and light. It faded. There was a pause. 

74 



KARNAK 

Only a bar of dull red, holding a hint of brown, lay- 
where the sun had sunk. And minutes passed — 
minutes for me full of silent expectation, while the 
moonlight grew a little stronger, a few more silver rays 
slipped down upon the ruins. I turned toward the 
east. And then came that curious crescendo of color 
and of light which, in Egypt, succeeds the diminuendo 
of color and of light that is the prelude to the pause be- 
fore the afterglow. Everything seemed to be in subtle 
movement, heaving as a breast heaves with the breath; 
swelling slightly, as if in an effort to be more, to at- 
tract attention, to gain in significance. Pale things be- 
came livid, holding apparently some under-brightness 
which partly penetrated its envelop, but a brightness 
that was white and almost frightful. Black things 
seemed to glow with blackness. The air quivered. Its 
silence surely thrilled with sound — with sound that 
grew ever louder. 

In the east I saw an effect. To the west I turned 
for the cause. The sunset light was returning. Horus 
would not permit Tum to reign even for a few brief 
moments, and Khuns, the sacred god of the moon, 
would be witness of a conflict in that lovely western 
region of the ocean of the sky where the bark of the 
sun had floated away beneath the mountain rim upon 
the red-and-orange tides. The afterglow was like an 
exquisite spasm, is always like an exquisite spasm, a 
beautiful, almost desperate effort ending in the quiet 

77 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

darkness of defeat. And through that spasmodic effort 
a world hved for some minutes with a hfe that seemed 
unreal, startling, magical. Color returned to the sky — 
color ethereal, trembling as if it knew it ought not to 
return. Yet it stayed for a while and even glowed, 
though it looked always strangely purified, and full of 
a crystal coldness. The birds that flew against it were 
no longer birds, but dark, moving ornaments, devised 
surely by a supreme artist to heighten here and there 
the beauty of the sky. Everything that moved against 
the afterglow — man, woman, child, camel and donkey, 
dog and goat, languishing buffalo, and plunging horse 
— became at once an ornament, invented, I fancied, by 
a genius to emphasize, by relieving it, the color in 
which the sky was drowned. And Khuns watched 
serenely, as if he knew the end. And almost suddenly 
the miraculous effort failed. Things again revealed 
their truth, whether commonplace or not. That pool 
of the Nile was no more a red jewel set in a feathery 
pattern of strange design, but only water fading from 
my sight beyond a group of palms. And that below 
me was only a camel going homeward, and that a child 
leading a bronze-colored sheep with a curly coat, and 
that a dusty flat-roofed hovel, not the fairy home of 
jinn, or the abode of some magician working marvels with 
the sun-rays he had gathered in his net. The air was no 
longer thrilling with music. The breast that had heaved 
with a divine breath was still as the breast of a corpse. 

78 



KARNAK 

And Khuns reigned quietly over the plains of 
Karnak. 

Karnak has no distinctive personality. Built under 
many kings its ruins are as complex as were probably 
once its completed temples, with their shrines, their 
towers, their courts, their hypostyle halls. As I looked 
down that evening in the moonlight I saw, softened and 
made more touching than in daytime, those alluring 
complexities, brought by the night and Khuns into a 
unity that was both tender and superb. Masses of 
masonry lay jumbled in shadow and in silver; gigantic 
walls cast sharply defined gloom ; obelisks pointed sig- 
nificantly to the sky, seeming, as they always do, to be 
murmuring a message; huge doorways stood up like 
giants unafraid of their loneliness and yet pathetic in 
it; here was a watching statue, there one that seemed 
to sleep, seen from afar. Yonder Queen Hatshepsu, 
who wrought wonders at Deir-el-Bahari, and who is 
more familiar perhaps as Hatasu, had left her traces, 
and nearer, to the right, Rameses III had made a 
temple, surely for the birds, so fond they are of it, so 
pertinaciously they haunt it. Rameses II, mutilated 
and immense, stood on guard before the terrific hall of 
Seti I ; and between him and my platform in the air 
rose the solitary lotus column that prepares you for the 
wonder of Seti's hall, which otherwise might almost 
overwhelm you — unless you are a Scotch lady in a 
helmet. And Khuns had his temple here by the Sphinx 

79 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

of the twelfth Rameses, and Ptah, who created "the 
sun egg and the moon egg," and who was said — only 
said, alas! — to have established on earth the "ever- 
lasting justice," had his, and still their stones receive 
the silver moon -rays and wake the wonder of men. 
Thothmes III, Thothmes I, Shishak, who smote the 
kneeling prisoners and vanquished Jeroboam, Medamut 
and Mut, Amenhotep I, and Amenhotep II — all have 
left their records or been celebrated at Karnak. Pur- 
posely I mingled them in my mind — did not attempt to 
put them in their proper order, or even to disentangle 
gods and goddesses from conquerors and kings. In the 
warm and seductive night Khuns whispered to me: 
"As long ago at Bekhten I exorcized the demon from 
the sufferinor Princess, so now I exorcize from these 
ruins all spirits but my own. To-night these ruins shall 
suggest nothing but majesty, tranquillity, and beauty. 
Their records are for Ra, and must be studied by his 
rays. In mine they shall speak not to the intellect, but 
only to the emotions and the soul." 

And presently I went down, and yielding a complete 
and happy obedience to Khuns, I wandered alone 
through the stupendous vestiges of past eras, dead 
ambitions, vanished glory, and long-outworn belief, 
and I ignored eras, ambitions, glory, and belief, and 
thought only of form, and height, of the miracle of 
blackness against silver, and of the pathos of statues 
whose ever-open eyes at night, when one is near them, 

80 



KARNAK 

suggest the working of some evil spell, perpetual 
watchfulness, combined with eternal inactivity, the un- 
slumbering mind caged in the body that is paralyzed. 

There is a temple at Karnak that I love, and I scarcely 
know why I care for it so much. It is on the right of 
the solitary lotus column before you come to the terrific 
hall of Seti. Some people pass it by, having but little 
time, and being hypnotized, it seems, by the more as- 
tounding ruin that lies beyond it. And perhaps it 
would be well, on a first visit, to enter it last; to let its 
influence be the final one to rest upon your spirit. This 
is the temple of Rameses III, a brown place of calm 
and retirement, an ineffable place of peace. Yes, though 
the birds love it and fill it often with their voices, it is 
a sanctuary of peace. Upon the floor the soft sand 
lies, placing silence beneath your footsteps. The pale 
brown of walls and columns, almost yellow in the sun- 
shine, is delicate and soothing, and inclines the heart 
to calm. Delicious, suggestive of a beautiful tapestry, 
rich and ornate, yet always quiet, are the brown reliefs 
upon the stone. What are they? Does it matter? 
They soften the walls, make them more personal, more 
tender. That surely is their mission. This temple 
holds for me a spell. As soon as I enter it, I feel the 
touch of the lotus, as if an invisible and kindly hand 
swept a blossom lightly across my face and downward 
to my heart. This courtyard, these small chambers 
beyond it, that last doorway framing a lovely darkness, 

83 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

soothe me even more than the terra-cotta hermitages 
of the Certosa of Pavia. And all the statues here are 
calm with an irrevocable calmness, faithful through 
passing years with a very sober faithfulness to the tem- 
ple they adorn. In no other place, one feels it, could 
they be thus at peace, with hands crossed forever upon 
their breasts which are torn by no anxieties, thrilled by 
no joys. As one stands among them, or, sitting on 
the base of a column in the chamber that lies beyond 
them, looks on them from a little distance, their attitude 
is like a summons to men to contend no more, to be 
still, to enter into rest. 

Come to this temple when you leave the hall of Seti. 
There you are in a place of triumph. Scarlet, some 
say, is the color of a great note sounded on a bugle. 
This hall is like a bugle-call of the past, thrilling even 
now down all the ages with a triumph that is surely 
greater than any other triumph. It suggests blaze — 
blaze of scarlet, blaze of bugle, blaze of glory, blaze 
of life and time, of ambition and achievement. In these 
columns, in the putting up of them, dead men sought 
to climb to sun and stars, limitless in desire, limitless 
in industry, limitless in will. And at the tops of the 
columns blooms the lotus, the symbol of rising. What 
a triumph in stone this hall was once, what a triumph 
in stone its ruin is to-day! Perhaps, among temples, 
it is the most wondrous thing in all Egypt, as it was 
no doubt the most wondrous temple in the world; 

84 



KARNAK 

among temples, I say, for the Sphinx is of all the marvels 
of Egypt by far the most marvelous. The grandeur 
of this hall almost moves one to tears, like the march- 
ing past of conquerors, stirs the heart with leaping 
thrills at the capacities of men. Through the thicket 
of columns, tall as forest trees, the intense blue of the 
African sky stares down, and their great shadows lie 
along the warm and sunlit ground. Listen! There 
are voices chanting. Men are working here — working 
as men worked how many thousands of years ago. But 
these are calling upon the Mohammedan's god as they 
slowly drag to the appointed places the mighty blocks of 
stone. And it is to-day a Frenchman who oversees them. 

"Help! Help! Allah give us help ! 
Help! Help! Allah give us help ! " 

The dust flies up about their naked feet. Triumph 
and work; work succeeded by the triumph all can see. 
I like to hear the workmen's voices within the hall of 
Seti. I like to see the dust stirred by their tramping feet. 

And then I like to go once more to the little temple, 
to enter through its defaced gateway, to stand alone in 
its silence between the rows of statues with their arms 
folded upon their quiet breasts, to gaze into the tender 
darkness beyond, — the darkness that looks consecrated, 
— to feel that peace is more wonderful than triumph, 
that the end of things is peace. 

Triumph and deathless peace, the bugle-call and 
silence — these are the notes of Karnak. 

87 



VIII 
LUXOR 

UPON the wall of the great court of Amenhotep 
III in the temple of Luxor there is a delicious 
dancing procession in honor of Rameses II. 
It is very funny and very happy; full of the joy of life 
— a sort of radiant cake-walk of old Egyptian days. 
How supple are these dancers! They seem to have 
no bones. One after another they come in line upon 
the mighty wall, and each one bends backward to the 
knees of the one who follows. As I stood and looked 
at them for the first time, almost I heard the twitter of 
flutes, the rustic wail of the African hautboy, the mo- 
notonous boom of the derabukkeh, cries of a far-off 
gaiety such as one often hears from the Nile by night. 
But these cries came down the long avenues of the 
centuries; this gaiety was distant in the vasty halls 
of the long-dead years. Never can I think of Luxor 
without thinking of those happy dancers, without think- 
ing of the life that goes in the sun on dancing, feet. 
/"There are a few places in the world that one asso- 
ciates with happiness, that one remembers always with 
a smile, a little thrill at the heart that whispers, "There 



LUXOR 

joy is." Of these few places Luxor is one — Luxor the 
home of sunshine, the suave abode of light, of warmth, 
of the sweet days of gold and sheeny, golden sunsets, 
of silver, shimmering nights through which the songs 
of the boatmen of the Nile go floating to the courts 
and the tombs of Thebes. The roses bloom in Luxor 
under the mighty palms. Always surely beneath the 
palms there are the roses. And the lateen-sails come 
up the Nile, looking like white-winged promises of 
future golden days. And! at dawn one wakes with hope 
and hears the songs of the dawn; and at noon one 
dreams of the happiness to come; and at sunset one is 
swept away on the gold into the heart of the golden 
world; and at night one looks at the stars, and each 
star is a twinkling hope. '[ Soft are the airs of Luxor; 
there is no harshness in the wind that stirs the leaves 
of the palms. And the land is steeped in light. From 
Luxor one goes with regret. One returns to it with 
joy on dancing feet. 

One day I sat in the temple, in the huge court with 
the great double row of columns that stands on the 
banks of the Nile and looks so splendid from it. The 
pale brown of the stone became almost yellow in the 
sunshine. From the river, hidden from me, stole up 
the songs of the boatmen. Nearer at hand I heard 
pigeons cooing, cooing in the sun, as if almost too glad, 
and seeking to manifest their gladness. Behind me, 
through the columns, peeped some houses of the vil- 

gi 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

lage: the white home of Ibrahim Ayyad, the perfect 
dragoman, grandson of Mustapha Aga, who entertained 
me years ago, and whose house stood actually within 
the precincts of the temple; houses of other fortunate 
dwellers in Luxor whose names I do not know. For 
the village of Luxor crowds boldly about the temple, 
and the children play in the dust almost at the foot of 
obelisks and statues. High on a brown hump of earth 
a buffalo stood alone, languishing serenely in the sun, 
gazing at me through the columns with light eyes that 
were full of a sort of folly of contentment. Some goats 
tripped by, brown against the brown stone — the dark 
brown earth of the native houses. Intimate life was 
here, striking the note of the coziness of Luxor. Here 
was none of the sadness and the majesty of Denderah. 
Grand are the ruins of Luxor, noble is the line of col- 
umns that boldly fronts the Nile; but Time has given 
them naked to the air and to the sun, to children and 
to animals. Instead of bats, the pigeons fly about 
them. There is no dreadful darkness in their sanctua- 
ries. Before them the life of the river, behind them the 
life of the village flows and stirs. Upon them looks 
down the Minaret of Abu Haggag; and as I sat in the 
sunshine, the warmth of which began to lessen, I saw 
upon its lofty circular balcony the figure of the muezzin. 
He leaned over, bending toward the temple and the 
statues of Rameses II and the happy dancers on the 
wall. He opened his lips and cried to them: 

92 



LUXOR 

"God is great. God is great. ... I bear witness 
that there is no god but God. ... I bear witness that 
Mohammed is the Apostle of God. . . . Come to 
prayer! Come to prayer! . . . God is great. God is 
great. There is no god but God." 

He circled round the minaret. He cried to the Nile. 
He cried to the Colossi sitting in their plain, and to the 
yellow precipices of the mountains of Libya. He cried 
to Egypt: 

,"Come to prayer! Come to prayer! There is no 
god but God. There is no god but God." 

The days of the gods were dead, and their ruined 
temple echoed with the proclamation of the one God 
of the Moslem world. "Come to prayer! Come to 
prayer!" The sun began to sink. 

Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me. 

The voice of the muezzin died away. There was a 
silence; and then, as if in answer to the cry from the 
minaret, I heard the chime of the angelus bell from the 
Catholic church of Luxor. 

Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark. 

I sat very still. The light was fading; all the yellow 
was fading, too, from the columns and the temple walls. 
I stayed till it was dark ; and with the dark the old 
gods seemed to resume their interrupted sway. And 
surely they, too, called to prayer. For do not these 
ruins of old Egypt, like the muezzin upon the minaret, 

95 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

like the angelus bell in the church tower, call one to 
prayer in the night? So wonderful are they under stars 
and moon that they stir the fleshly and the worldly de- 
sires that lie like drifted leaves about the reverence and 
the aspiration that are the hidden core of the heart. 
And it is released from its burden; and it awakes and 
prays. 

Amun-Ra, Mut, and Khuns, the king of the gods, 
his wife, mother of gods, and the moon god, were the 
Theban triad to whom the holy buildings of Thebes on 
the two banks of the Nile were dedicated; and this 
temple of Luxor, the " House of Amun in the Southern 
Apt," was built fifteen hundred years before Christ by 
Amenhotep III. Rameses II, that vehement builder, 
added to it immensely. One walks among his traces 
when one walks in Luxor. And here, as at Denderah, 
Christians have let loose the fury that should have had 
no place in their religion. Churches for their worship 
they made in different parts of the temple, and when 
they were not praying, they broke in pieces statues, 
defaced bas-reliefs, and smashed up shrines with a 
vigor quite as great as that displayed in preservation by 
Christians of to-day. Now time has called a truce. 
Safe are the statues that are left. And day by day two 
great religions, almost as if in happy brotherly love, 
send forth their summons by the temple walls. And 
just beyond those walls, upon the hill, there is a Coptic 
church. Peace reigns in happy Luxor. The lion lies 

96 



LUXOR 

down with the Iamb, and the child, if it will, may 
harmlessly put its hand into the cockatrice's den. 

Perhaps because it is so surrounded, so haunted by 
life and familiar things, because the pigeons fly about 
it, the buffalo stares into it, the goats stir up the dust 
beside its columns, the twittering voices of women 
make a music near its courts, many people pay little 
heed to this great temple, gain but a small impression 
from it. It decorates the bank of the Nile. You can see 
it from the dahabiyehs. For many that is enough. 
Yet the temple is a noble one, and, for me, it gains a 
definite attraction all its own from the busy life about 
it, the cheerful hum and stir. And if you want fully 
to realize its dignity, you can always visit it by night. 
Then the cries from the village are hushed. The 
houses show no lights. Only the voices from the Nile 
steal up to the obelisk of Rameses, to the pylon from 
which the flags of Thebes once flew on festal days, to 
the shrine of Alexander the Great, with its vultures 
and its stars, and to the red granite statues of Rameses 
and his wives. 

These last are as expressive and of course more 
definite than my dancers. They are full of character. 
They seem to breathe out the essence of a vanished 
domesticity. Colossal are the statues of the king, solid, 
powerful, and tremendous, boldly facing the world 
with the calm of one who was thought, and possibly 
thought himself, to be not much less than a deity. And 

99 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

upon each pedestal, shrinking dehcately back, was once 
a little wife. Some little wives are left. They are de- 
licious in their modesty. Each stands away from the 
king, shyly, respectfully. Each is so small as to be 
below his down-stretched arm. Each, with a surely 
furtive gesture, reaches out her right hand, and attains 
the swelling calf of her noble husband's leg. Plump are 
their little faces, but not bad-looking. One cannot pity 
the king. Nor does one pity them. For these were 
not "Les desenchantees," the restless, sad-hearted 
women of an Eastern world that knows too much. 
Their longings surely cannot have been very great. 
Their world was probably bounded by the calf of 
Rameses's leg. That was "the far horizon" of the 
little plump-faced wives. 

The happy dancers and the humble wives, they al- 
ways come before me with the temple of Luxor — joy 
and discretion side by side. And with them, to my 
ears, the two voices seem to come, muezzin and angelus 
bell, mingling not in war, but peace. When I think of 
this temple, I think of its joy and peace far less than of 
its majesty. 

And yet it is majestic. Look at it, as I have often 
done, toward sunset from the western bank of the Nile, 
or climb the mound beyond its northern end, where 
stands the grand entrance, and you realize at once its 
nobility and solemn splendor. From the Loiilias deck 
it was a procession of great columns ; that was all. 

lOO 



LUXOR 

But the decorative effect of these columns, soaring" 
above the river and its vivid Hfe, is fine. 

By day all is turmoil on the river-bank. Barges are 
unloading, steamers are arriving, and throngs of donkey- 
boys and dragomans go down in haste to meet them. 
Servants run to and fro on errands from the many 
dahabiyehs. Bathers leap into the brown waters. The 
native craft pass by with their enormous sails out- 
spread to catch the wind, bearing serried mobs of men, 
and black-robed women, and laughing, singing children. 
The boatmen of the hotels sing monotonously as they 
lounge in the big, white boats waiting for travelers to 
Medinet-Abu, to the Ramesseum, to Kurna, and the 
tombs. And just above them rise the long lines of col- 
umns, ancient, tranquil, and remote — infinitely remote, 
for all their nearness, casting down upon the sunlit 
gaiety the long shadow of the past. 

From the edge of the mound where stands the native 
village the effect of the temple is much less decora- 
tive, but its detailed grandeur can be better grasped 
from there; for from there one sees the great towers 
of the propylon, two rows of mighty columns, the red 
granite Obelisk of Rameses the Great, and the black 
granite statues of the king. On the right of the en- 
trance a giant stands, on the left one is seated, and a 
little farther away a third emerges from the ground, 
which reaches to its mighty breast. 

And there the children play perpetually. And there 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

the Egyptians sing their serenades, making the pipes 
wail and striking the derabukkeh ; and there the women 
gossip and twitter Hke the birds. And the buffalo comes 
to take his sun-bath; and the goats and the curly, 
brown sheep pass in sprightly and calm processions. 
The obelisk there, like its brother in Paris, presides 
over a cheerfulness of life ; but it is a life that seems 
akin to it, not alien from it. And the king watches the 
simplicity of this keen existence of Egypt of to-day 
far up the Nile with a calm that one does not fear may 
be broken by unsympathetic outrage, or by any vision 
of too perpetual foreign life. For the tourists each 
year are but an episode in Upper Egypt. Still the 
shadoof-man sings his ancient song, violent and pa- 
thetic, bold as the burning sun-rays. Still the fellaheen 
plow with the camel yoked with the ox. Still the 
women are covered with protective amulets and hold 
their black draperies in their mouths. The intimate life 
of the Nile remains the same. And that life obelisk 
and king have known for how many, many years! 

And so I love to think of this intimacy of life about 
the temple of the happy dancers and the humble little 
wives, and it seems to me to strike the keynote of the 
golden coziness of Luxor. 



104 



IX 

COLOSSI OF MEMNON 

NEVERTHELESS, sometimes one likes to 
escape from the thing one loves, and there are 
hours when the gay voices of Luxor fatigue 
the ears, when one desires a great calm. Then there 
are silent voices that summon one across the river, when 
the dawn is breaking over the hills of the Arabian desert, 
or when the sun is declining toward the Libyan moun- 
tains — voices issuing from lips of stone, from the 
twilight of sanctuaries, from the depths of rock-hewn 
tombs. 

The peace of the plain of Thebes in the early morn- 
ing is very rare and very exquisite. It is not the peace 
of the desert, but rather, perhaps, the peace of the 
prairie — an atmosphere tender, delicately thrilling, 
softly bright, hopeful in its gleaming calm. Often and 
often have I left the Loulia very early, moored against 
the long sand islet that faces Luxor when the Nile has 
not subsided, I have rowed across the quiet water that 
divided me from the western bank, and, with a happy 
heart, I have entered into the lovely peace of the great 
spaces that stretch from the Colossi of Memnon to the 

107 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

Nile, to the mountains, southward toward Armant, 
northward to Kerekten, to Danfik, to Gueziret-Meteira. 
Think of the color of young clover, of young barley, 
of young wheat ; think of the timbre of the reed flute's 
voice, thin, clear, and frail with the frailty of dewdrops; 
think of the torrents of spring rushing through the 
veins of a great, wide land, and growing almost still 
at last on their journey. Spring, you will say, perhaps, 
and high Nile not yet subsided ! But Egypt is the 
favored land of a spring that is already alert at the end 
of November, and in December is pushing forth its 
green. The Nile has sunk away from the feet of the 
Colossi that it has bathed through many days. It has 
freed the plain to the fellaheen, though still it keeps my 
island in its clasp. And Hapi, or Kam-wra, the " Great 
Extender," and Ra, have made this wonderful spring 
to bloom on the dark earth before the Christian's 
Christmas. 

What a pastoral it is, this plain of Thebes, in the 
dawn of day ! Think of the reed flute, I have said, 
not because you will hear it, as you ride toward the 
mountains, but because its voice would be utterly in 
place here, in this arcady of Egypt, playing no taran- 
tella, but one of those songs, half bird-like, and half 
sadly, mysteriously human, which come from the soul 
of the East. Instead of it, you may catch distant cries 
from the bank of the river, where the shadoof-man 
toils, lifting ever the water and his voice, the one to 

io8 



COLOSSI OF MEMNON 

earth, the other, it seems, to sky; and the creaking lay 
of the water-wheel, which pervades Upper Egypt like 
an atmosphere, and which, though perhaps at first it 
irritates, at last seems to you the sound of the soul of 
the river, of the sunshine, and the soil. 

Much of the land looks painted. So flat is it, so 
young are the growing crops, that they are like a coat- 
ing of green paint spread over a mighty canvas. But 
the doura rises higher than the heads of the naked 
children who stand among it to watch you canter past. 
And in the far distance you see dim groups of trees — 
sycamores and acacias, tamarisks and palms. Beyond 
them is the very heart of this " land of sand and ruins 
and gold": Medinet-Abu, the Ramesseum, Deir-el- 
Medinet, Kurna, Deir-el-Bahari, the tombs of the kings, 
the tombs of the queens and of the princes. In the 
strip of bare land at the foot of those hard, and yet po- 
etic, mountains, have been dug up treasures the fame of 
which has gone to the ends of the world. But this 
plain, where the fellaheen are stooping to the soil, and 
the women are carrying the water-jars, and the children 
are playing in the doura, and the oxen and the camels 
are working with plows that look like relics of far-off 
days, is the possession of the two great presiding be- 
ings whom you see from an enormous distance, the Co- 
lossi of Memnon. Amenhotep III put them where they 
are. So we are told. But in this early morning it is 
not possible to think of them as being brought to any 

III 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

place. Seated, the one beside the other, facing the 
Nile and the home of the rising sun, their immense as- 
pect of patience suggests will, calmly, steadily exercised, 
suggests choice; that, for some reason, as yet unknown, 
they chose to come to this plain, that they choose sol- 
emnly to remain there, waiting, while the harvests grow 
and are gathered about their feet, while the Nile rises 
and subsides, while the years and the generations come, 
like the harvests, and are stored away in the granaries 
of the past. Their calm broods over this plain, gives 
to it a personal atmosphere which sets it quite apart 
from every other flat space of the world. There is no 
place that I know on the earth which has the peculiar, 
bright, ineffable calm of the plain of these Colossi. It 
takes you into its breast, and you lie there in the grow- 
ing sunshine almost as if you were a child laid in the lap 
of one of them. That legend of the singing at dawn of 
the " vocal Memnon," how could it have arisen? How 
could such calmness sing, such patience ever find a 
voice ? Unlike the Sphinx, which becomes ever more 
impressive as you draw near to it, and is most impres- 
sive when you sit almost at its feet, the Colossi lose in 
personality as you approach them and can see how they 
have been defaced. 

From afar one feels their minds, their strange, un- 
earthly temperaments commanding this pastoral. When 
you are beside them, this feeling disappears. THeir 
features are gone, and though in their attitudes there is 

112 



COLOSSI OF MEMNON 

power, and there is something that wakens awe, they 
are more wonderful as a far-off feature of the plain. 
They gain in grandeur from the night, in strangeness 
from the moonrise, perhaps specially when the Nile 
comes to their feet. More than three thousand years 
old, they look less eternal than the Sphinx. Like 
them, the Sphinx is waiting, but with a greater purpose. 
The Sphinx reduces man really to nothingness. The 
Colossi leave him some remnants of individuality. One 
can conceive of Strabo and yElius Callus, of Hadrian 
and Sabina, of others who came over the sunlit land to 
hear the unearthly song in the dawn, being of some — 
not much, but still of some — importance here. Before 
the Sphinx no one is important. But in the distance of 
the plain the Colossi shed a real magic of calm and 
solemn personality, and subtly seem to mingle their 
spirit with the flat, green world, so wide, so still, so 
fecund, and so peaceful; with the soft airs that are surely 
scented with an eternal springtime, and with the light 
that the morning rains down on wheat and clover, on 
Indian corn and barley, and on brown men laboring, 
who, perhaps, from the patience of the Colossi in repose 
have drawn a patience in labor that has in it some- 
thing not less sublime. 

From the Colossi one goes onward toward the trees 
and the mountains, and very soon one comes to the 
edge of that strange and fascinating strip of barren land 
which is strewn with temples and honeycombed with 

115 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

tombs. The sun burns down on it. The heat seems 
thrown back upon it by the wall of tawny mountains 
that bounds it on the west. It is dusty, it is arid; it 
is haunted by swarms of flies, by the guardians of the 
ruins, and by men and boys trying to sell enormous 
scarabs and necklaces and amulets, made yesterday, and 
the day before, in the manufactory of Kurna. From 
many points it looks not unlike a strangely prolonged 
rubbish-heap in w^hich busy giants have been digging 
with huge spades, making mounds and pits, caverns 
and trenches, piling up here a monstrous heap of stones, 
casting down there a mighty statue. But how it fasci- 
nates! Of course one knows what it means. One 
knows that on this strip of land Naville dug out at 
Deir-el-Bahari the temple of Mentu-hotep, and dis- 
covered later, in her shrine, Hathor, the cow-goddess, 
with the lotus-plants streaming from her sacred fore- 
head to her feet; that long before him Mariette here 
brought to the light at Drah-abu"l-Neggah the trea- 
sures of kings of the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties; 
that at the foot of those tiger-colored precipices, Theo- 
dore M. Davis, the American, found the sepulcher of 
Queen Hatshepsu, the Queen Elizabeth of the old 
Egyptian world, and, later, the tomb of Yuaa and 
Thuaa, the parents of Queen Thiy, containing mummy- 
cases covered with gold, jars of oil and wine, gold, silver, 
and alabaster boxes, a bed decorated with gilded ivory, 
a chair with gilded plaster reliefs, chairs of state, and 

1 16 



COLOSSI OF MEMNON 

a chariot; that here Maspero, Victor Loret, Brugsch 
Bey, and other patient workers gave to the world 
tombs that had been hidden and unknown for cen- 
turies; that there to the north is the temple of Kurna, 
and over there the Ramesseum; that those rows of little 
pillars close under the mountain, and looking strangely 
modern, are the pillars of Hatshepsu's temple, which 
bears upon its walls the pictures of the expedition to 
the historic land of Punt; that the kings were buried 
there, and there the queens and the princes of the van- 
ished dynasties; that beyond to the west is the temple 
of Deir-el-Medinet with its judgment of the dead; that 
here by the native village is Medinet-Abu. One knows 
that, and so the imagination is awake, ready to paint 
the lily and to gild the beaten gold. But even if one 
did not know, I think one would be fascinated. This 
turmoil of sunbaked earth and rock, gray, yellow, pink, 
orange, and red, awakens the curiosity, summons the 
love of the strange, suggests that it holds secrets to 
charm the souls of men. 



119 



X 

MEDINET-ABU 

A T the entrance to the temple of Medinet-Abu, 
/_% near the small groups of palms and the few 
X jk- brown houses, often have I turned and looked 
back across the plain before entering through the 
first beautiful doorway, to see the patient backs and 
right sides of the colossi, the far-off, dreamy 
mountains beyond Karnak and the Nile. And 
again, when I have entered and walked a little 
distance, I have looked back at the almost magical 
picture framed in the doorway; at the bottom of the 
picture a layer of brown earth, then a strip of sharp 
green, — the cultivated ground, — then a blur of pale yel- 
low, then a darkness of trees, and just the hint of a hill 
far, very far away. And always, in looking, , I have 
thought of the " Sposalizio " of Raphael in the Brera at 
Milan, of the tiny dream of blue country framed by his 
temple doorway beyond the Virgin and Saint Joseph. 
The doorways of the temples of Egypt are very noble, 
and nowhere have I been more struck by their nobility 
than in Medinet-Abu. Set in huge walls of massive 
masonry, which rise slightly above them on each side, 

1 20 



MEDINET-ABU 

with a projecting cornice, in their simphcity they look 
extraordinarily classical, in their sobriety mysterious, 
and in their great solidity quite wonderfully elegant. 
And they always suggest to me that they are giving 
access to courts and chambers which still, even in our 
times, are dedicated to secret cults — to the cults of 
Isis, of Hathor, and of Osiris. 

Close to the right of the front of Medinet-Abu there 
are trees covered with yellow flowers; beyond are fields 
of doura. Behind the temple is a sterility which makes 
one think of metal. A great calm enfolds this place. 
The buildings are of the same color as the colossi. 
When I speak of the buildings, I include the great 
temple, the pavilion of Rameses III, and the little 
temple, which together may be said to form Medinet- 
Abu. Whereas the temple of Luxor seems to open its 
arms to life, and the great fascination of the Rames- 
seum comes partly from its invasion by every travel- 
ing air and happy sun-ray, its openness and freedom, 
Medinet-Abu impresses by its colossal air of secrecy, 
by its fortress-like seclusion. Its walls are immensely 
thick, and are covered with fig^ures the same color as 
the walls, some of them very tall. Thick set, massive, 
heavy, almost warlike it is. Two seated statues 
within, statues with animals' faces, steel-colored, or 
perhaps a little darker than that, look like savage war- 
ders ready to repel intrusion. 

Passing between them, delicately as Agag, one enters 

I 2 -J 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

an open space with ruins, upon the right of which is a 
low, small temple, gray in hue, and covered with in- 
scriptions, which looks almost bowed under its tremen- 
dous weight of years. From this dignified, though tiny, 
veteran there comes a perpetual sound of birds. The 
birds in Egypt have no reverence for age. Never have 
I seen them more restless, more gay, or more imperti- 
nent, than in the immemorial ruins of this ancient land. 
Beyond is an enormous portal, on the lofty ceiling of 
which still linger traces of faded red and blue, which 
gives access to a great hall with rows of mighty col- 
umns, those on the left hand round, those on the right 
square, and almost terribly massive. There is in these 
no grace, as in the giant lotus columns of Karnak. 
Prodigious, heavy, barbaric, they are like a hymn in 
stone to strength. There is something brutal in their 
aspect, which again makes one think of war, of assaults 
repelled, hordes beaten back like waves by a sea-wall. 
And still another great hall, with more gigantic col- 
umns, lies in the sun beyond, and a doorway through 
which seems to stare fiercely the edge of a hard and 
fiery mountain. Although one is roofed by the sky, 
there is something oppressive here; an imprisoned feel- 
ing comes over one. I could never be fond of Medinet- 
Abu, as I am fond of Luxor, of parts of Karnak, of 
the whole of delicious, poetical Philas. The big pylons, 
with their great walls sloping inward, sand-colored, 
and glowing with very pale yellow in the sun, the re- 

I 24 










^ ^ Hi f 



^\^N. \ 






:y^ 









tv -0 



^'■^ II!; ;^"' 




MEDINET-ABU 

sistant walls, the brutal columns, the huge and almost 
savage scale of everything, always remind me of the 
violence in men, and also — I scarcely know why — 
make me think of the North, of sullen Northern castles 
by the sea, in places where skies are gray, and the 
white of foam and snow is married in angry nights. 

And yet in Medinet-Abu there reigns a splendid 
calm — a calm that sometimes seems massive, resistant, 
as the columns and the walls. Peace is certainly in- 
closed by the stones that call up thoughts of war, as 
if, perhaps, their purpose had been achieved many 
centuries ago, and they were quit of enemies forever. 
Rameses III is connected with Medinet-Abu. He was 
one of the greatest of the Egyptian kings, and has 
been called the " last of the great sovereigns of Egypt." 
He ruled for thirty-one years, and when, after a first 
visit to Medinet-Abu, I looked into his records, I was 
interested to find- that his conquests and his wars had " a 
character essentially defensive." This defensive spirit 
is incarnated in the stones of these ruins. One reads 
in them something of the soul of this king who lived 
twelve hundred years before Christ, and who desired 
" in remembrance of his Syrian victories " to give to 
his memorial temple an outward military aspect. I 
noticed a military aspect at once inside this temple ; 
but if you circle the buildings outside it is more un- 
mistakable. Eor the east front has a battlemented 
wall, and the battlements are shield-shaped. This 

127 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

fortress, or migdol, a name which the ancient Egyptians 
borrowed from the nomadic tribes of Syria, is called 
the "Pavilion of Rameses III," and his principal bat- 
tles are represented upon its walls. The monarch does 
not hesitate to speak of himself in terms of praise, 
suggesting that he was like the God Mentu, who was 
the Egyptian war god, and whose cult at Thebes was 
at one period more important even than was the cult of 
Amun, and also plainly hinting that he was a brave 
fellow. "I, Rameses the King," he murmurs, "be- 
haved as a hero who knows his worth." J[f hieroglyphs 
are to be trusted, various Egyptian kings of ancient 
times seem to have had some vague suspicion of their 
own value, and the walls of Medinet-Abu are, to speak 
sincerely, one mighty boast. In his later years the 
king lived in peace and luxury, surrounded by a vicious 
and intriguing court haunted by magicians, hags, and 
mystery-mongers. Dealers in magic may still be found 
on the other side of the river, in happy Luxor. I made 
the acquaintance of two when I was there, one of whom 
offered for a couple of pounds to provide me with a 
preservative against all such dangers as beset the trav- 
eler in wild places. In order to prove its efficacy he 
asked me to come to his house by night, bringing a 
dog and my revolver with me. He would hang the 
charm about the dog's neck,- and I was then to put six 
shots into the animal's body. He positively assured 
me that the dog would be uninjured. I half-promised 

128 



MEDINET-ABU 

to come, and, when night began to fall, looked vaguely 
about for a dog. At last I found one, but it howled so 
dismally, when I asked Ibrahim Ayyad to take pos- 
session of it for experimental purposes, that I weakly 
gave up the project, and left the magician clamoring 
for his hundred and ninety-five piasters. 

Its warlike aspect gives a special personality to 
Medinet-Abu. ■ The shield-shaped battlements; the 
court-yards, with their brutal columns, narrowing as 
they recede toward the mountains ; the heavy gateways, 
with superimposed chambers; the towers; quadrangu- 
lar bastion to protect, inclined basement to resist the 
attacks of sappers and cause projectiles to rebound — all 
these things contribute to this very definite effect. 

I have heard travelers on the Nile speak piteously 
of the confusion wakened in their minds by a hurried 
survey of many temples, statues, monuments, and 
tombs. But if one stays long enough this confusion 
fades happily away, and one differentiates between the 
antique personalities of ancient Egypt almost as easily 
as one differentiates between the personalities of one's 
familiar friends. Among these personalities Medinet- 
Abu is the warrior, standing like Mentu, with the solar 
disk, and the two plumes erect above his head of a 
hawk, firmly planted at the foot of the Theban moun- 
tains, ready to repel all enemies, to beat back all as- 
saults, strong and determined, powerful and brutally 
serene. 

131 



XI 

THE RAMESSEUM 



r ■ IHIS, my lord, is the thinking place of Rameses 
I the Great." 

-*- So said Ibrahim Ayyad to me one morning 

— Ibrahim who is almost as prolific in the abrupt crea- 
tion of peers as if he were a democratic government. 

I looked about me. We stood in a ruined hall with 
columns, architraves covered with inscriptions, seg- 
ments of flat roof. Here and there traces of painting, 
dull-red, pale, ethereal blue, — the "love-color" of 
Egypt, as the Egyptians often call it, — still adhered to 
the stone. This hall, dignified, grand, but happy, was 
open on all sides to the sun and air. From it I could 
see tamarisk and acacia-trees, and far-off shadowy 
mountains beyond the eastern verge of the Nile. And 
the trees were still as carven things in an atmosphere 
that was a miracle of clearness and of purity. Behind 
me, and near, the hard Libyan mountains gleamed in 
the sun. Somewhere a boy was singing ; and sud- 
denly his singing died away. And I thought of the 
"Lay of the Harper" which is inscribed upon the 

132 



THE RAMESSEUM 

tombs of Thebes — those tombs under those gleaming 
mountains : 

For no one carries away his goods with him ; 
Yea, no one returns again who has gone thither. 

It took the place of the song that had died as I 
thought of the great king's glory ; that he had been here, 
and had long since passed away. 

" The thinking place of Rameses the Great ! " 

" Suttinly." 

" You must leave me alone here, Ibrahim." 

I watched his gold-colored robe vanish into the gold 
of the sun through the copper color of the columns. 
And I was quite alone in the "thinking place" of 
Rameses. It was a brilliant day, the sky dark sapphire 
blue, without even the specter of a cloud, or any airy, 
vaporous veil ; the heat already intense in the full sun- 
shine, but delicious, if one slid into a shadow. I slid 
into a shadow, and sat down on a warm block of stone. 
And the silence flowed upon me — the silence of the 
Ramesseum. 

Was HorbcJiutct, the winged disk, with crowned 
uraei, ever set up above this temple's principal door to 
keep it from destruction ? I do not know. But, if he 
was, he failed perfectly to fullil his mission. And I am 
glad he failed. I am glad of the ruin that is here, glad 
that walls have crumbled or been overthrown, that 
columns have been cast down, and ceilings torn off 

135 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

from the pillars that supported them, letting in the sky. 
I would have nothing different in the thinking place of 
Rameses. 

Like a cloud, a great golden cloud, a glory impend- 
ing that will not, cannot, be dissolved into the ether, he 
loomed over the Egypt that is dead, he looms over the 
Egypt of to-day. Everywhere you meet his traces, 
everywhere you hear his name. You say to a tall 
young Egyptian : " How big you are growing, Has- 
san ! " 

He answers, " Come back next year, my gentleman, 
and I shall be like Rameses the Great." 

Or you ask of the boatman who rows you, " How 
can you pull all day against the current of the Nile ? " 
And he smiles, and lifting his brown arm, he says to 
you : " Look! I am as strong as Rameses the Great." 

This familiar fame comes down through some three 
thousand, two hundred, and twenty years. Carved 
upon limestone and granite, now it seems engraven also 
on every Egyptian heart that beats not only with the 
movement of shadoof, or is not buried in the black soil 
fertilized by Hapi. Thus can inordinate vanity pro- 
long the true triumph of genius, and impress its own 
view of itself upon the minds of millions^ This Ram- 
eses is believed to be the Pharaoh who oppressed the 
children of Israel. 

As I sat in the Ramesseum that morning, I recalled 
his face — the face of an artist and a dreamer rather 

136 



THE RAMESSEUM 

than that of a warrior and oppressor ; Asiatic, hand- 
some, not insensitive, not cruel, but subtle, aristocratic, 
and refined. I could imagine it bending above the 
little serpents of the sistrum as they lifted their melodi- 
ous voices to bid Typhon depart, or watching the 
dancing women's rhythmic movements, or smiling half 
kindly, half with irony, upon the lovelorn maiden who 
made her plaint : 

" What is sweet to the mouth, to me is as the gall of birds ; 
Thy breath alone can comfort my heart." 

And I could imagine it looking profoundly grave, 
not sad, among the columns with their opening lotus 
flowers. For it is the hall of the lotus columns that 
Ibrahim calls the thinking place of the king. 

There is something both lovely and touching to me 
in the lotus columns of Egypt, in the tall masses of 
stone opening out into i^owers near the sun. Near the 
sun! Yes; only that obvious falsehood will convey to 
those who have not seen them the effect of some of the 
hypostyle halls, the columns of which seem literally 
soaring to the sky. And flowers of stone, you will say, 
rudely carved and rugged! That does not matter. 
There was poetry in the minds that conceived them, in 
the thought that directed the hands which shaped them 
and placed them where they are. In Egypt perpetually 
one feels how the ancient Egyptians loved the Nyni- 
phcsa Lotus, which is the white lotus, and the Nymplicea 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

coeruloea, the lotus that is blue. Did they not place 
Horus in its cup, and upon the head of Nefer-Tum, 
the nature god, who represented in their mythology 
the heat of the rising sun, and who seems to have been 
credited with power to grant life in the world to come, 
set it as a sort of regal ornament? To Seti I, when 
he returned in glory from his triumphs over the Syrians, 
were given bouquets of lotus blossoms by the great 
officers of his household. The tiny column of green 
feldspar ending in the lotus typified eternal youth, even 
as the carnelian buckle typified the blood of Isis, which 
washed away all sin. Kohl pots were fashioned in the 
form of the lotus, cartouches sprang from it, wine flowed 
from cups shaped like it. The lotus was part of the 
very life of Egypt, as the rose, the American beauty 
rose, is part of our social life of to-day. And here, in 
the Ramesseum, I found campaniform, or lotus-flower 
capitals on the columns — here where Rameses once 
perhaps dreamed of his Syrian campaigns, or of that 
famous combat when, " like Baal in his fury," he fought 
single-handed against the host of the Hittites massed 
in two thousand, five hundred chariots to overthrow 
him. 

The Ramesseum is a temple not of winds, but of 
soft and kindly airs. There comes Zephyrus, whis- 
pering love to Flora incarnate in the Lotus. To every 
sunbeam, to every little breeze, the ruins stretch out 
arms. They adore the deep-blue sky, the shining, 

140 



I 
u 




i ' ^ i 1 




THE RAMESSEUM 

sifted sand, untrammeled nature, all that whispers, 
" Freedom." 

So I felt that day when Ibrahim left me, so I feel 
always when I sit in the Ramesseum, that exultant vic- 
tim of Time's here not sacrilegious hand. 

All strong souls cry out secretly for liberty as for a 
sacred necessity of life. Liberty seems to drench the 
Ramesseum. And all strong souls must exult there. 
The sun has taken it as a beloved possession. No 
massy walls keep him out. No shield-shaped battle- 
ments rear themselves up against the outer world as at 
Medinet-Abu. No huge pylons cast down upon the 
ground their forms in darkness. The stone glows with 
the sun, seems almost to have a soul glowing with the 
sense, the sun-ray sense, of freedom. The heart leaps 
up in the Ramesseum not frivolously, but with a 
strange, sudden knowledge of the depths of passionate 
joy there are in life and in bountiful, glorious nature. 
Instead of the strength of a prison, one feels the ecstasy 
of space ; instead of the safety of inclosure, the rapture 
of naked publicity. But the public to whom this place 
of the great king is consigned is a public of Theban 
hills; of the sunbeams striking from them over the wide 
world toward the east; of light airs, of drifting sand 
grains, of singing birds, and of butterflies with pure 
white wings. If you have ever ridden an Arab horse, 
mounted in the heart of an oasis, to the verge of the 
great desert, you will remember the bound, thrilling 

^43 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

with fiery animation, which he gives when he sets his 
feet on the sand beyond the last tall date-palms. A 
bound like that the soul gives when you sit in the 
Ramesseum, and see the crowding sunbeams, the far- 
off groves of palm-trees, and the drowsy mountains, 
like shadows, that sleep beyond the Nile. And you 
look up, perhaps, as I looked that morning, and upon 
a lotus column near you, relieved, you perceive the fig- 
ure of a young man singing. 

A young man singing! Let him be the tutelary god 
of this place, whoever he be, whether only some humble, 
happy slave, or the "superintendent of song and of the 
recreation of the king." Rather even than Amun-Ra 
let him be the god. For there is something nobly 
joyous in this architecture, a dignity that sings. 

It has been said, but not established, that Rameses 
the Great was buried in the Ramesseum, and when 
first I entered it the " Lay of the Harper" came to my 
mind, with the sadness that attends the passing away 
of glory into the shades of death. But an optimism 
almost as determined as Emerson's was quickly bred 
in me there. I could not be sad, though I could be 
happily thoughtful, in the light of the Ramesseum. 
And even when I left the thinking place, and, coming 
down the central aisle, saw in the immersing sunshine 
of the Osiride Court the fallen colossus of the king, I 
was not struck to sadness. 

Imagine the greatest figure in the world, — such a fig- 
144 







ipli, copiTiglil by U lulcrw iMiil & Uiiik 



THE RAMESSEUM 

ure as this Rameses was in his day, — with all might, 
all glory, all climbing power, all vigor, tenacity of 
purpose, and granite strength of will concentrated 
within it, struck suddenly down, and falling backward in 
a collapse of which the thunder might shake the vitals of 
the earth, and you have this prostrate colossus. Even 
now one seems to hear it fall, to feel the warm soil 
trembling beneath one's feet as one approaches it. A 
row of statues of enormous size, with arms crossed as if 
in resignation, glowing in the sun, in color not gold or 
amber, but a delicate, desert yellow, watch near it like 
servants of the dead. On a slightly lower level than 
theirs it lies, and a little nearer the Nile. Only the 
upper half of the figure is left, but its size is really ter- 
rific. This colossus was fifty-seven feet high. It 
weighed eight hundred tons. Eight hundred tons of 
syenite went to its making, and across the shoulders its 
breadth is, or was, over twenty-two feet. But one 
does not think of measurements as one looks upon it. 
It is stupendous. That is obvious and that is enough. 
Nor does one think of its finish, of its beautiful, rich 
color, of any of its details. One thinks of it as a tre- 
mendous personage laid Ioav, as the mightiest of the 
mighty fallen. OnCithinks of it as the dead Rameses 
whose glory still looms over Egypt like a golden cloud 
that will not disperse. One thinks of it as the soul that 
commanded, and, lo! there rose up above the sands, at 
the foot of the hills of Thebes, the exultant Ramesseum. 

147 



XII 

DEIR-EL-BAHARI 

PLACE for Queen Hatshepsu! Surely she comes 
to a sound of flutes, a merry noise of thin, 
bright music, backed by a clashing of barbaric 
cymbals, along the corridors of the past; this queen who 
is shown upon Egyptian walls dressed as a man, who 
is said to have worn a beard, and who sent to the land 
of Punt the famous expedition which covered her with 
glory and brought gold to the god Amun. To me most 
feminine she seemed when I saw her temple at Deir-el- 
Bahari, with its brightness and its suavity; its pretty 
shallowness and sunshine; its white, and blue, and yel- 
low, and red, and green and orange; all very trim and 
fanciful, all very smart and delicate; full of finesse 
and laughter, and breathing out to me of the twentieth 
century the coquetry of a woman in 1500 B.C. After 
the terrific masculinity of Medinet-Abu, after the great 
freedom of the Ramesseum, and the grandeur of its 
colossus, the manhood of all the ages concentrated in 
granite, the temple at Deir-el-Bahari came upon me like 
a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a 

148 



DEIR-EL-BAHARI 

creation of white and blue and orange, standing — ever 
so knowingly — against a background of orange and 
pink, of red and of brown-red, a smiling coquette of the 
mountain, a gay and sweet enchantress who knew her 
pretty powers and meant to exercise them. 

Hatshepsu with a beard ! Never will I believe it. 
Or if she ever seemed to wear one, I will swear it was 
only the tattooed ornament with- which all the lovely 
women of the Fayum decorate their chins to-day, 
throwing into relief the smiling, soft lips, the delicate 
noses, the liquid eyes, and leading one from it step by 
step to the beauties it precedes. 

Mr. Wallis Budge says in his book on the antiquities 
of Egypt: " It would be unjust to the memory of a 
great man and a loyal servant of Hatshepsu, if we 
omitted to mention the name of Senmut, the architect 
and overseer of works at Deir-el-Bahari." By all 
means let Senmut be mentioned, and then let him be 
utterly forgotten. A radiant queen reigns here — a 
queen of fantasy and splendor, and of that divine shal- 
lowness — refined frivolity literally cut into the moun- 
tain — which is the note of Deir-el-Bahari. And what 
a clever background ! Oh, Hatshepsu knew what she 
was doing when she built her temple here. It was 
not the solemn Senmut (he wore a beard, I 'm sure) 
who chose that background, if I know anything of 
women. 

Long before I visited Deir-el-Bahari I had looked 

n 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

at it from afar. My eyes had been drawn to it merely 
from its situation right underneath the mountains. I 
had asked : " What do those Httle pillars mean? And 
are those little doors?" I had promised myself to go 
there, as one promises oneself a bonne boucJie to finish 
a happy banquet. And I had realized the subtlety, 
essentially feminine, that had placed a temple there. 
And Mentu-Hotep's temple, perhaps you say, was it 
not there before the queen's? Then he must have pos- 
sessed a subtlety purely feminine, or have been advised 
by one of his wives in his building operations, or by some 
favorite female slave. Blundering, unsubtle man would 
probably think that the best way to attract and to fix 
attention on any object was to make it much bigger 
than things near and around it, to set up a giant among 
dwarfs. 

Not so Queen Hatshepsu. More artful in her gen- 
eration, she set her long but little temple against the 
precipices of Libya. And what is the result ? Simply 
that whenever one looks toward them one says, "What 
are those little pillars?" Or if one is more instructed, 
one thinks about Queen Hatshepsu. The precipices 
are as nothing. A woman's wile has blotted them out. 

And yet how grand they are ! I have called them 
tiger-colored precipices. And they suggest tawny wild 
beasts, fierce, bred in a land that is the prey of the sun. 
Every shade of orange and yellow glows and grows 
pale on their bosses, in their clefts. They shoot out 



..,- J'l^^'^'S^"*' "^"^v "■ '**^ 



T^Y!; 




''''^**2=**"*'!*««T*^'<.*^ ^ 




DEIR-EL-BAHARI 

turrets of rock that blaze like flames in the day. They 
show great teeth, like the tiger when any one draws 
near. And, like the tiger, they seem perpetually in- 
formed by a spirit that is angry. Blake wrote of the 

tiger : 

Tiger, tiger, burning bright 
In the forests of the night. 

These tiger-precipices of Libya are burning things, 
avid like beasts of prey. But the restored apricot- 
colored pillars are not afraid of their impending fury — 
fury of a beast baffled by a tricky little woman, almost 
it seems to me; and still less afraid are the white pillars, 
and the brilliant paintings that decorate the walls 
within. 

As many people in the sad but lovely islands off the 
coast of Scotland believe in "doubles," as the old 
classic writers believed in man's "genius," so the an- 
cient Egyptians believed in his " Ka," or separate 
entity, a sort of spiritual other self, to be propitiated 
and ministered to, presented with gifts, and served with 
energy and ardor. On this temple of Deir-el-Bahari 
is the scene of the birth of Hatshepsu, and there are 
two babies, the princess and her Ka. For this imagined 
Ka, when a great queen, long after, she built this 
temple, or chapel, that offerings might be made there 
on certain appointed days. Fortunate Ka of H^^epsu 
to have had so cheerful a dwelling ! Livelin^fef per- 
vades Deir-el-Bahari. I remember, when I was on 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

my first visit to Egypt, lunching at Thebes with Mon- 
sieur Naville and Mr. Hogarth, and afterward going 
with them to watch the digging away of the masses of 
sand and rubbish which concealed this gracious build- 
ing. I remember the songs of the half-naked work- 
men toiling and sweating in the sun. And I remember 
seeing a white temple wall come up into the light with 
all the painted figures surely dancing with joy upon it. 
And they are surely dancing still. 

Here you may see, brilliant as yesterday's picture 
anywhere, fascinatingly decorative trees growing 
bravely in little pots, red people offering incense which 
is piled up in mounds like mountains ; Ptah-Seket, 
Osiris receiving a royal gift of wine, the queen in the 
company of various divinities, and the terrible ordeal 
of the cows. The cows are being weighed in scales. 
There are three of them. One is a philosopher, and 
reposes with an air that says, "Even this last indignity 
of being weighed against my will cannot perturb my 
soaring spirit." But the other two, sitting up, look as 
apprehensive as old ladies in a rocking express, ex- 
pectant of an accident. The vividness of the colors 
in this temple is quite wonderful. And much of its 
great attraction comes rather from its position, and from 
them, than essentially from itself. At Deir-el-Bahari, 
what the long shell contains — its happy murmur of life 
— is more fascinating than the shell. There, instead of 
being uplifted or overawed by form, we are rejoiced by 

156 



DEIR-FX-BAHARI 

color, by the high vivacity of arrested movement, by 
the story that color and movement tell. And over all 
there is the bright, blue, painted sky, studded, almost 
distractedly studded, with a plethora of the yellow stars 
the Egyptians made like starfish. 

The restored apricot-colored columns outside look 
unhappily suburban when you are near them. The 
white columns with their architraves are more pleasant 
to the eyes. The niches full of bright hues, the arched 
chapels, the small, white steps leading upward to shal- 
low sanctuaries, the small black foxes facing each 
other on little yellow pedestals — attract one like the 
details and amusing ornaments of a clever woman's 
boudoir. Through this most characteristic temple one 
roves in a gaily attentive mood, feeling all the time 
Hatshepsu's fascination. 

You may see her, if you will, a little lady on the 
wall, with a face decidedly sensual — a long, straight nose, 
thick lips, an expression rather determined than agree- 
able. Her mother looks as Semitic as a Jew money- 
lender in Brick Lane, London. Her husband, Thothmes 
n, has a weak and poor-spirited countenance. De- 
cidedly an accomplished performer on the second violin. 
The mother wears on her head a snake, no doubt a cobra- 
di-capello, the symbol of her sovereignty. Thothmes 
is clad in a loin-cloth. And a god, with a sleepy ex- 
pression and a very fishlike head, appears in this group 
of personages to offer the key of life. Another paint- 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

ing of the queen shows her on her knees drinking milk 
from the sacred cow, with an intent and greedy figure, 
and an extraordinarily sensual and expressive face. 
That she was well guarded is surely proved by a brave 
display of her soldiers — red men on a white wall. Full 
of life and gaiety, all in a row they come, holding 
weapons, and, apparently, branches, and advancing 
with a gait of triumph that tells of "spacious days." 
And at their head is an officer, who looks back, much 
like a modern drill sergeant, to see how his men are 
marching. 

In the southern shrine of the temple, cut in the rock 
as is the northern shrine, once more I found traces of 
the "Lady of the Under-world." For this shrine was 
dedicated to Hathor, though the whole temple was 
sacred to the Theban god Amun. Upon a column 
were the remains of the goddess's face, with a broad 
brow and long, large eyes. Some fanatic had hacked 
away the mouth. 

The tomb of Hatshepsu was found by Mr. Theodore 
M. Davis, and the famous VacJie of Deir-el-Bahari by 
Monsieur Naville as lately as 1905. It stands in the 
museum at Cairo, but forever it will be connected in 
the minds of men with the tiger-colored precipices and 
the Colonnades of Thebes. Behind the ruins of the 
temple of Mentu-Hotep III, in a chapel of painted 
rock, the V^ache- Hathor was found. 

It is not easy to convey by any description the im- 

160 



DEIR-EL-BAHARI 

pression this marvelous statue makes. Many of us 
love our dogs, our horses, some of us adore our cats ; 
but which of us can think, without a smile, of worship- 
ing a cow? Yet the cow was the Egyptian Aphrodite's 
sacred animal. Under the form of a cow she was 
often represented. And in the statue she is presented 
to us as a limestone cow. And positively this cow is 
to be worshiped. 

She is shown in the act apparently of stepping 
gravely forward out of a small arched shrine, the walls 
of which are decorated with brilliant paintings. Her 
color is red and yellowish red, and is covered with 
blotches of very dark green, which look almost black. 
Only one or two are of a bluish color. Her height is 
moderate. I stand about five foot nine, and I found 
that on her pedestal the line of her back was about 
level with my chest. The lower part of the body, 
much of which is concealed by the under block of lime- 
stone, is white, tinged with yellow. The tail is red. 
Above the head, open and closed lotus flowers form a 
head-dress, with the lunar disk and two feathers. And 
the long lotus stalks flow down on each side of the 
neck toward the ground. At the back of this head- 
dress are a scarab and a cartouche. The goddess is 
advancing solemnly and gently. A wonderful calm, a 
matchless, serene dignity enfold her. 

In the body of this cow one is able, indeed one is 
almost obliged, to feel the soul of a goddess. The in- 

163 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

credible is accomplished. The dead Egyptian makes 
the ironic, the skeptical modern world feel deity in a 
limestone cow. How is it done? I know not; but it 
is done. Genius can do nearly anything, it seems. 
Under the chin of the cow there is a standing statue of 
the King Mentu-Hotep, and beneath her the king 
kneels as a boy. Wonderfully expressive and solemnly 
refined is the cow's face, which is of a dark color, like 
the color of almost black earth — earth fertilized by the 
Nile. Dignified, dominating, almost but just not stern, 
strongly intelligent, and, through its beautiful intelli- 
gence, entirely sympathetic ("to understand all, is to 
pardon all "), this face, once thoroughly seen, com- 
pletely noticed, can never be forgotten. This is one of 
the most beautiful statues in the world. 

\\'hcn I was at Deir-el-Bahari I thought of it and 
A\ishcd that it still stood there near the Colonnades of 
Thebes under the tiger-colored precipices. And then 
I thought of Hatshepsu. Surely she could not brook 
a ri\'al to-day near the temple which she made — a 
rival long lost and long forgotten. Is not her influence 
still there upon the terraced platforms, among the ap- 
ricot and the \\hite columns, near the paintings of the 
land of Punt ? Did it not whisper to the antiquaries, 
even to the soldiers from Cairo, A\ho guarded the 
\'ache-Hathor in the night, to make haste to take her 
away far from the hills of Thebes, and from the Nile's 
long southern reaches, that the great queen might once 

164 



DEIR-EL-BAHARl 

more reign alone ? They obeyed. Hatshepsu was 
appeased. And, like a delicate woman, perfumed and 
arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and 
orange, standing ever so knowingly against a back- 
ground of orange and pink, of red and of brow^n-red, 
she rules at Deir-el-Bahari. 



165 



XIII 
THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS 

ON the \\ ay to the tombs of the kings I went to 
the temple of Kurna, that lonely cenotaph, 
with its sand-colored, massive fa9ade, its heaps 
of fallen stone, its wide and ruined doorway, its thick, 
almost rough, columns recalling Medinet-Abu. There 
is not very much to see, but from there one has a fine 
view of other temples — of the Ramesseum, looking 
superb, like a grand skeleton ; of Medinet-Abu, distant, 
very pale gold in the morning sunlight; of little Deir-al- 
Medinet, the pretty child of the Ptolemies, with the heads 
of the seven Hathors. And from Kurna the Colossi are 
exceptionally grand and exceptionally personal, so per- 
sonal that one imagines one sees the expressions of the 
faces that they no longer possess. 

Even if you do not go into the tombs, — but you will 
go, — you must ride to the tombs of the kings ; and 
you must, if you care for the finesse of impressions, 
ride on a blazing day and toward the hour of noon. 
Then the ravine is itself, like the great act that demon- 
strates a temperament. It is the narrow home of fire, 

1 66. 



THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS 

hemmed in by brilliant colors, nearly all — perhaps 
quite all — of which could be found in a glowing 
furnace. Every shade of yellow is there, — lemon 
yellow, sulphur yellow, the yellow of amber, the yel- 
low of orange with its tendency toward red, the yellow 
of gold, sand color, sun color. Cannot all these yel- 
lows be found in a fire ? And there are reds — pink of 
the carnation, pink of the coral, red of the little rose 
that grows in certain places of sands, red of the bright 
flame's heart. And all these colors are mingled in com- 
plete sterility. And all are fused into a fierce brotherhood 
by the sun. And like a flood, they seem flowing to the 
red and the yellow mountains, like a flood that is flow- 
ing to its sea. You are taken by them toward the 
mountains, on and on, till the world is closing in, and 
you know the way must come to an end. And it comes 
to an end — in a tomb. 

You go to a door in the rock, and a guardian lets 
you in, and wants to follow you in. Prevent him if 
you can. Pay him. Go in alone. For this is the 
tomb of Amenhotep II ; and he himself is here, far 
down, at rest under the mountain, this king who lived 
and reigned more than fourteen hundred years before 
the birth of Christ. The ravine-valley leads to him, 
and you should go to him alone. He lies in the heart 
of the living rock, in the dull heat of the earth's bow- 
els, which is like no other heat. You descend by stairs 
and corridors, you pass over a well by a bridge, you 

I 69 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

pass through a naked chamber ; and the king is not 
there. And you go on down another staircase, and 
along another corridor, and you come into a pillared 
chamber, with paintings on its walls, and on its pillars, 
paintings of the king in the presence of the gods of the 
under-world, under stars in a soft blue sky. And below 
you, shut in on the farther side by the solid mountain 
in whose breast you have all this time been walking, 
there is a crypt. And you turn away from the bright 
paintings, and down there you see the king. 

Many years ago in London I went to the private 
view of the Royal Academy at Burlington House. I 
went in the afternoon when the galleries were crowded 
with politicians and artists, with dealers, gossips, quid- 
nuncs, 2ir\d flaneurs; with authors, fashionable lawyers, 
and doctors ; with men and women of the world ; with 
young dandies and actresses en vogue. A roar of voices 
went up to the roof. Every one was talking, smiling, 
laughing, commenting, and criticizing. It was a little 
picture of the very worldly world that loves the things 
of to-day and the chime of the passing hours. And 
suddenly some people near me were silent, and some 
turned their heads to stare with a strangely fixed 
attention. And I saw coming toward me an emaciated 
figure, rather bent, much drawn together, walking 
slowly on legs like sticks. It was clad in black, with a 
gleam of color. Above it was a face so intensely thin 
that it was like the face of death. And in this face shone 

I 70 



THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS 

two eyes that seemed full of — the other world. And, 
like a breath from the other world passing, this man 
went by me and was hidden from me by the throng. 
It was Cardinal Manning in the last days of his life. 

The face of this king is like his, but it has an even 
deeper pathos as it looks upward to the rock. And 
the king's silence bids you be silent, and his immo- 
bility bids you be still. And his sad, and unutterable 
resignation sifts awe, as by the desert wind the sand is 
sifted into the temples, into the temple of your heart. 
And you feel the touch of time, but the touch of eter- 
nity, too. And as, in that rock-hewn sanctuary, you 
whisper "Pax vobiscum," you say it for all the world. 



173 



XIV 
EDFU 

PRAYER pervades the East. Far off across the 
sands, when one is travehng in the desert, one 
sees thin minarets rising toward the sky. A 
desert city is there. It signals its presence by this mute 
appeal to Allah. And where there are no minarets, — 
in the great wastes of the dunes, in the eternal silence, 
the lifelessness that is not broken even by any lonely, 
wandering bird, — the camels are stopped at the ap- 
pointed hours, the poor, and often ragged, robes are 
laid down, the brown pilgrims prostrate themselves in 
prayer. And the rich man spreads his carpet, and 
prays. And the half-naked nomad spreads nothing; 
but he prays, too. The East is full of lust, and full of 
money-getting, and full of bartering, and full of vio- 
lence ; but it is full of worship — of worship that dis- 
dains concealment, that recks not of ridicule or 
comment, that believes too utterly to care if others 
disbelieve. There are in the East many men who do 
not pray. They do not laugh at the man who does, 
like the unpraying Christian. There is nothing ludicrous 

174 



EDFU 

to them in prayer. In Egypt your Nubian sailor prays 
in the stern of your dahabiyeh ; and your Egyptian 
boatman prays by the rudder of your boat ; and your 
black donkey-boy prays behind a red rock in the sand ; 
and your camel-man prays when you are resting in the 
noontide, watching the far-off, ciuivering mirage, lost 
in some wayward dream. 

And must you not pray, too, when you enter certain 
temples where once strange gods were worshiped in 
whom no man now believes ? 

There is one temple on the Nile which seems to em- 
brace in its arms all the worship of the past; to be full 
of prayers and solemn praises ; to be the holder, the 
noble keeper, of the sacred longings, of the unearthly 
desires and aspirations, of the dead. It is the temple 
of Edfu. From all the other temples it stands apart. 
It is the temple of the inward flame, of the secret soul 
of man ; of that mystery within us that is exquisitely 
sensitive, and exquisitely alive ; that has longings it 
cannot tell, and sorrows it dare not whisper, and loves 
it can only love. 

To Horus it was dedicated, — hawk-headed Horus, 
— the son of I sis and Osiris, who was crowned with 
many crowns, who was the young Apollo of the old 
Egyptian world. But though I know this, I am never 
able to associate Edfu with Horus, that child wearinsr 
the side-lock, — when he is not hawk-headed in his 
solar aspect, — that boy with his finger in his mouth, 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

that youth who fought against Set, murderer of his 
father. 

Edfu, in its solemn beauty, in its perfection of form, 
seems to me to pass into a region altogether beyond 
identification with the worship of any special deity, 
with particular attributes, perhaps with particular limi- 
tations ; one who can be graven upon walls, and upon 
architraves and pillars painted in brilliant colors ; one 
who can personally pursue a criminal, like some police- 
man in the street ; even one who can rise upon the 
world in the visible glory of the sun. To me, Edfu 
must always represent the world- worship of " the 
Hidden One" ; not Amun, god of the dead, fused with 
Ra, with Amsu, or with Khnum : but that other "Hid- 
den One," who is God of the happy hunting-ground of 
savages, with whom the Buddhist strives to merge his 
strange serenity of soul; who is adored in the "Holy 
Places " by the Moslem, and lifted mystically' above the 
heads of kneeling Catholics in cathedrals dim with in- 
cense, and merrily praised with the banjo and the trumpet 
in the streets of black English cities; who is asked for 
children by longing women, and for new dolls by lisping 
babes ; whom the atheist denies in the day, and fears in 
the darkness of night ; who is on the lips alike of priest 
and blasphemer, and in the soul of all human life. 

Edfu is the temple of "the Hidden One." It is not 
pagan ; it is not Christian : it is a place in which to 
worship according to the dictates of your heart. 

178 



EDFU 

Edfu stands alone, not near any other temple, on the 
bank of the Nile between Luxor and Assuan. It is 
not very far from El-Kab, once the capital of Upper 
Egypt, and it is about two thousand years old. The 
building of it took over one hundred and eighty years, 
and it is the most perfectly preserved temple to-day of 
all the antique world. It is huge and it is splendid. It 
has towers one hundred and twelve feet high, a propy- 
lon two hundred and fifty-two feet broad, and walls 
four hundred and fifty feet long. Begun in the reign 
of Ptolemy III, it was completed only fifty-seven years 
before the birth of Christ. 

You know these facts about it, and you forget them, 
or at least you do not think of them. What does all 
that matter when you are alone in Edfu? Let the anti- 
quarian go with his anxious nose almost touching the 
stone ; let the Egyptologist peer through his glasses at 
hieroglyphs and puzzle out the meaning of cartouches : 
but let us wander at ease, and worship, and regard the 
exquisite form, and drink in the mystical spirit, of this 
very wonderful temple. 

Do you care about form? Here you will find it in 
absolute perfection. Edfu is the consecration of form. 
In proportion it is supreme above all other Egyptian 
temples. Its beauty of form is like a music. Its de- 
sign affects one like the chiseled loveliness of a perfect 
sonnet. While the world lasts, no architect can arise 
to create a building more satisfying, more calm with the 

13 „ 

I 8 I 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

calm of faultlessness, more serene with a just serenity. 
Or so it seems to me. I think of the most lovely build- 
ings I know in Europe — of the Alhambra at Granada, 
of the Cappella Palatina in the palace at Palermo. And 
Edfu I place with them — Edfu utterly different from 
them, more different, perhaps, even than they are from 
each other, but akin to them, as all great beauty is 
mysteriously akin. I have spent morning after morn- 
ing in the Alhambra, and many and many an hour in 
the Cappella Palatina ; and never have I been weary of 
either, or longed to go away. And this same sweet 
desire to stay came over me in Edfu. The Loulia was 
tied up by the high bank of the Nile. The sailors were 
glad to rest. There was no steamer sounding its 
hideous siren to call me to its crowded deck. So I 
yielded to my desire, and for long I stayed in Edfu. 
And when at last I left it I said to myself, " This is a 
supreme thing," and I knew that within me had sud- 
denly developed the curious passion for buildings that 
some people never feel, and that others feel ever grow- 
ing and growing. 

Yes, Edfu is supreme. No alteration could improve 
it. Any change made in it, however slight, could only 
be harmful to it. Pure and perfect is its design — broad 
propylon, great open courtyard with pillared galleries, 
halls, chambers, sanctuary. Its dignity and its sobriety 
are matchless. I know they must be, because they 
touched me so strangely, with a kind of reticent en- 

182 




;i':^ 




EDFU 

chantment, and I am not by nature enamoured of so- 
briety, of reticence and calm, but am inclined to delight 
in almost violent force, in brilliance, and, especially, in 
combinations of color. In the Alhambra one finds both 
force and fairylike lightness, delicious proportions, del- 
icate fantasy, a spell as of subtle magicians ; in the 
Cappella Palatina a jeweled splendor, combined with a 
small perfection of form which simply captivates the 
whole spirit and leads it to adoration. In Edfu you 
are face to face with hugeness and with grandeur; but 
soon you are scarcely aware of either — in the sense, 
at least, that connects these qualities with a certain 
overwhelming, almost striking down, of the spirit and 
the faculties. What you are aware of is your own im- 
mense and beautiful calm of utter satisfaction — a calm 
which has quietly inundated you, like a waveless tide 
of the sea. How rare it is to feel this absolute satisfac- 
tion, this praising serenity! The critical spirit goes, 
like a bird from an opened window. The excited, laud- 
atory, voluble spirit goes. And this splendid calm is 
left. If you stay here, you, as this temple has been, 
will be molded into a beautiful sobriety. From the 
top of the pylon you have received this still and glori- 
ous impression from the matchless design of the whole 
building, which you see best from there. When you 
descend the shallow staircase, when you stand in the 
great court, when you go into the shadowy halls, then 
it is that the utter satisfaction within you deepens. 

185 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

Then it is that you feel the need to worship in this 
place created for worship. 

The ancient Egyptians made most of their temples 
in conformity with a single type. The sanctuary was 
the heart, the core, of each temple — the sanctuary 
surrounded by the chambers in which were laid up the 
precious objects connected with ceremonies and sac- 
rifices. Leading to this core of the temple, which was 
sometimes called " the divine house," were various halls 
the roofs of which were supported by columns — those 
hypostyle halls which one sees perpetually in Egypt. 
Before the first of these halls was a courtyard sur- 
rounded by a colonnade. In the courtyard the priests 
of the temple assembled. The people were allowed to 
enter the colonnade. A gateway with towers gave en- 
trance to the courtyard. If one visits many of the 
Egyptian temples, one soon becomes aware of the 
subtlety, combined with a sort of high simplicity, and 
sense of mystery and poetry, of these builders of the 
past. As a great writer leads one on, with a concealed 
but beautiful art, from the first words of his story to the 
last — the last words to which all the other words are 
ministering servants ; as the great musician — Wagner 
in his " Meistersinger," for instance, — leads one from 
the first notes of his score to those final notes which 
magnificently reveal to the listeners the real meaning of 
those first notes, and of all the notes which followed 
them : so the Egyptian builders lead the spirit gently, 

i86 



EDFU 

mysteriously forward from the gateway between the 
towers to the distant house divine. When one enters 
the outer court, one feels the far-off sanctuary. Almost 
unconsciously one is aware that for that sanctuary all 
the rest of the temple was created ; that to that sanctu- 
ary everything tends. And in spirit one is drawn softly 
onward to that very holy place. Slowly, perhaps, the 
body moves from courtyard to hypostyle hall, and from 
one hall to another. Hieroglyphs are examined, car- 
touches puzzled out, paintings of processions, or bas- 
reliefs of pastimes and of sacrifices, looked at with care 
and interest ; but all the time one has the sense of 
waiting, of a want unsatisfied. And only when one at 
last reaches the sanctuary is one perfectly at rest. For 
then the spirit feels : " This is the meaning of it all." 

One of the means which the Egyptian architects used 
to create this sense of approach is very simple, but 
perfectly effective. It consists only in making each hall 
on a very slightly higher level than the one preceding 
it, and the sanctuary, which is narrow and mysteriously 
dark, on the highest level of all. Each time one takes 
an upward step, or walks up a little incline of stone, 
the body seems to convey to the soul a deeper message 
of reverence and awe. In no other temple is this sense 
of approach to the heart of a thing so acute as it is 
when one walks in Edfu. In no other temple, when the 
sanctuary is reached, has one such a strong conscious- 
ness of being indeed within a sacred heart. 

187 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

The color of Edfu is a pale and delicate brown, warm 
in the strong sunshine, but seldom glowing. Its first 
doorway is extraordinarily high, and is narrow, but very 
deep, with a roof showing traces of that delicious, clear 
blue-green which is like a thin cry of joy rising up in 
the solemn temples of Egypt. A small sphinx keeps 
watch on the right, just where the guardian stands; 
this guardian, the gift of the past, squat, even fat, with 
a very perfect face of a determined and handsome man. 
In the court, upon a pedestal, stands a big bird, and 
near it is another bird, or rather half of a bird, leaning 
forward, and much defaced. And in this great court- 
yard there are swarms of living birds twittering in the 
sunshine. Through the doorway between the towers 
one sees a glimpse of a native village with the cupolas 
of a mosque. 

I stood and looked at the cupolas for a moment. 
Then I turned, and forgot for a time the life of the 
world without — that men, perhaps, were praying be- 
neath those cupolas, or praising the Moslem's God. 
For when I turned, I felt, as I have said, as if all the 
worship of the world must be concentrated here. 
Standing far down the open court, in the full sunshine, 
I could see into the first hypostyle hall, but beyond 
only a darkness — a darkness which led me on, in 
which the further chambers of the house divine were 
hidden. As I went on slowly, the perfection of the 
plan of the dead architects was gradually revealed to 

i88 



EDFU 

me, when the darkness gave up its secrets ; when I saw 
not clearly, but dimly, the long way between the col- 
umns, the noble columns themselves, the gradual, slight 
upward slope, — graduated by genius ; there is no other 
word,— which led to the sanctuary, seen at last as a 
little darkness, in which all the mystery of worship, 
and of the silent desires of men, was surely con- 
centrated, and kept by the stone forever. Even the 
succession of the darknesses, like shadows growing 
deeper and deeper, seemed planned by some great artist 
in the management of light, and so of shadow effects. 
The perfection of form is in Edfu, impossible to de- 
scribe, impossible not to feel. The tremendous effect 
it has — an effect upon the soul— is created by a com- 
bination of shapes, of proportions, of different levels, 
of different heights, by consummate graduation. And 
these shapes, proportions, different levels, and heights, 
are seen in dimness. Not that jeweled dimness one 
loves in Gothic cathedrals, but the heavy dimness of 
wandowless, mighty chambers lighted only by a rebuked 
daylight ever trying to steal in. One is captured by 
no ornament, seduced by no lovely colors. Better than 
any ornament, greater than any radiant glory of color, 
is this massive austerity. It is like the ultimate in an 
art. Everything has been tried, every strangeness, 
bizarrerie, absurdity, every wild scheme of hues, every 
preposterous subject — to take an extreme instance, a 
camel, wearing a top-hat, and lighted up by fireworks, 

191 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

which I saw recently in a picture-gallery of Munich. 
And at the end a genius paints a portrait of a wrinkled 
old woman's face, and the world regards and worships. 
Or all discords have been flung together pell-mell, reso- 
lution of them has been deferred perpetually, perhaps 
even denied altogether, chord of B major has been struck 
with C major, works have closed upon the leading note 
or the dominant seventh, symphonies have been com- 
posed to be played in the dark, or to be accompanied 
by a magic-lantern's efforts, operas been produced 
which are merely carnage and a row, — and at the end 
a genius writes a little song, and the world gives the 
tribute of its breathless silence and its tears. And it 
knows that though other things may be done, better 
things can never be done. For no perfection can ex- 
ceed any other perfection. 

And so in Edfu I feel that this untinted austerity is 
perfect; that whatever may be done in architecture 
during future ages of the world, Edfu, while it lasts, 
will remain a thing supreme — supreme in form and, 
because of this supremacy, supreme in the spell which 
it casts upon the soul. 

The sanctuary is just a small, beautifully propor- 
tioned, inmost chamber, with a black roof, containing 
a sort of altar of granite, and a great polished granite 
shrine which no doubt once contained the god Horus. 
I am glad he is not there now. How far more im- 
pressive it is to stand in an empty sanctuary, in the 

192 



EDFU 

house divine of "the Hidden One," whom the nations 
of the earth worship, whether they spread their robes 
on the sand and turn their faces to Mecca, or beat the 
tambourine and sing "glory-hymns" of salvation, or 
flagellate themselves in the night before the patron saint 
of the Passionists, or only gaze at the snow-white 
plume that floats from the snows of Etna under the 
rose of dawn, and feel the soul behind Nature. Among 
the temples of Egypt, Edfu is the house divine of "the 
Hidden One," the perfect temple of worship. 



195 



XV 

KOM OMBOS 

SOME people talk of the "sameness" of the Nile; 
and there is a lovely sameness of golden light, 
of delicious air, of people, and of scenery. For 
Egypt is, after all, mainly a great river with strips on 
each side of cultivated land, flat, green, not very varied. 
River, green plains, yellow plains, pink, brown, steel- 
grav, or pale-yellow mountains, wail of shadoof, wail of 
sakieh. Yes, I suppose there is a sameness, a sort of 
golden monotony, in this land pervaded with light and 
pervaded with sound. Always there is light around you, 
and you are bathing in it, and nearly always, if you 
are living, as I was, on the water, there is a multitude 
of mingling sounds floating, floating to your ears. As 
there are two lines of green land, two lines of moun- 
tains, following the course of the Nile; so are there 
two lines of voices that cease their calling and their 
singing only as you draw near to Nubia. For then, 
with the green land, they fade away, these miles upon 
miles of calling and singing brown men; and amber 
and ruddy sands creep downward to the Nile. And 
the air seems subtly changing, and the light perhaps 

196 



KOM OMBOS 

growing a little harder. And you are aware of other 
regions unlike those you are leaving, more African, 
more savage, less suave, less like a dreaming. And 
especially the silence makes a great impression on you. 
But before you enter this silence, between the amber 
and ruddy walls that will lead you on to Nubia, and to 
the land of the crocodile, you have a visit to pay. For 
here, high up on a terrace, looking over a great bend 
of the river, is Kom Ombos. And Kom Ombos is the 
temple of the crocodile god. 

Sebek was one of the oldest and one of the most 
evil of the Egyptian gods. In the Fayum he was 
worshiped, as well as at Kom Ombos, and there, in the 
holy lake of his temple, were numbers of holy croco- 
diles, which Strabo tells us were decorated with jewels 
hke pretty women. He did not get on with the other 
gods, and was sometimes confused with Set, who per- 
sonified natural darkness, and who also was worshiped 
by the people about Kom Ombos. 

I have spoken of the golden sameness of the Nile, 
but this sameness is broken by the variety of the 
temples. Here you have a striking instance of this 
variety. Edfu, only forty miles from Kom Ombos, the 
next temple which you visit, is the most perfect temple 
in Egypt. Kom Ombos one of the most imperfect. 
Edfu is a divine house of "the Hidden One," full of a 
sacred atmosphere. Kom Ombos is the house of 
crocodiles. In ancient days the inhabitants of Edfu 

199 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

abhorred, above everything, crocodiles and their 
worshipers. And here at Kom Ombos the crocodile 
was adored. You are in a different atmosphere. 

As soon as you land, you are greeted with crocodiles, 
though fortunately not by them. A heap of their black 
mummies is shown to you reposing in a sort of tomb 
or shrine open at one end to the air. By these mummies 
the new note is loudly struck. The crocodiles have 
carried you in an instant from that which is pervad- 
ingly general to that which is narrowly particular ; from 
the purely noble, which seems to belong to all time, to 
the entirely barbaric, which belongs only to times out- 
worn. It is difficult to feel as if one had anything in 
common with men who seriously worshiped crocodiles, 
had priests to feed them, and decorated their scaly 
necks with jewels. 

Yet the crocodile god had a noble temple at Kom 
Ombos, a temple which dates from the times of the 
Ptolemies, though there was a temple in earlier days 
which has now disappeared. Its situation is splendid. 
It stands high above the Nile, and close to the river, on 
a terrace which has recently been constructed to save 
it from the encroachments of the water. And it looks 
down upon a view which is exquisite in the clear light 
of early morning. On the right, and far off, is a de- 
licious pink bareness of distant flats and hills. Op- 
posite there is a flood of verdure and of trees going to 
mountains, a spit of sand where is an inlet of the river, 

200 



KOM OMBOS 

with a crowd of native boats, perhaps waiting for a 
wind. On the left is the big bend of the Nile, singu- 
larly beautiful, almost voluptuous in form, and girdled 
with a radiant green of crops, with palm-trees, and 
again the distant hills. Sebek was v/ell advised to 
have his temples here and in the glorious Fayum, that 
land flowing with milk and honey, where the air is full 
of the voices of the flocks and herds, and alive with 
the wild pigeons; where the sweet sugar-cane towers 
up in fairy forests, the beloved home of the jackal; 
where the green corn waves to the horizon, and the 
runlets of water make a maze of silver threads carry- 
ing life and its happy murmur through all the vast oasis. 

At the guardian's gate by which you go in there sits 
not a watch dog, nor yet a crocodile, but a watch cat, 
small, but very determined, and very attentive to its 
duties, and neatly carved in stone. You try to look 
like a crocodile-worshiper. It is deceived, and lets you 
pass. And you are alone with the growing morning 
and Kom Ombos. 

I was never taken, caught up into an atmosphere, in 
Kom Ombos. I examined it with interest, but I did 
not feel a spell. Its grandeur is great, but it did not 
affect me as did the grandeur of Karnak. Its nobility 
cannot be questioned, but I did not stilly rejoice in it, 
as in the nobility of Luxor, or the free splendor of the 
Ramesseum. 

The oldest thing at Kom Ombos is a gateway of 
203 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

sandstone placed thereby Thothmes III as a tribute to 
Sebek. The great temple is of a warm-brown color, 
a very rich and particularly beautiful brown, that 
soothes and almost comforts the eyes that have been 
for many days boldly assaulted by the sun. Upon the 
terrace platform above the river you face a low and 
ruined wall, on which there are some lively reliefs, be- 
yond which is a large, open court containing a quantity 
of stunted, once big columns standing on big bases. 
Immediately before you the temple towers up, very 
gigantic, very majestic, with a stone pavement, walls 
on which still remain some traces of paintings, and 
really grand columns, enormous in size and in good 
formation. There are fine architraves, and some bits of 
roofing, but the greater part is open to the air. Through 
a doorway is a second hall containing columns much 
less noble, and beyond this one walks in ruin, among 
crumbled or partly destroyed chambers, broken statues, 
become mere slabs of granite and fallen blocks of 
stone. At the end is a wall, with a pavement bordering 
it, and a row of chambers that look like monkish cells, 
closed by small doors. At Kom Ombos there are two 
sanctuaries, one dedicated to Sebek, the other to Heru- 
ur, or Haroeris, a form of Horus in Egyptian called "the 
Elder," which was worshiped with Sebek here by the 
admirers of crocodiles. Each of them contains a ped- 
estal of granite upon which once rested a sacred bark 
bearing an image of the deity. 

204 



KOM OMBOS 

There are some fine reliefs scattered through these 
mighty ruins, showing Sebek with the head of a crocodile, 
Heru-ur with the head of a hawk so characteristic of 
Horus, and one strange animal which has no fewer 
than four heads, apparently meant for the heads of lions. 
One relief which I specially noticed for its life, its 
charming vivacity, and its almost amusing fidelity to 
details unchanged to-day, depicts a number of ducks 
in full flight near a mass of lotus flowers. I remem- 
bered it one day in the Fayum, so intimately associated 
with Sebek, when I rode twenty miles out from camp 
on a dromedary to the end of the great lake of Kurun, 
where the sand wastes of the Libyan desert stretch to 
the pale and waveless waters which, that day, looked 
curiously desolate and even sinister under a low, gray 
sky. Beyond the wiry tamarisk bushes, which grow 
far out from the shore, thousands upon thousands of 
wild duck were floating as far as the eyes could see. 
We took a strange native boat, manned by two half- 
naked fishermen, and were rowed with big, broad- 
bladed oars out upon the silent flood that the silent 
desert surrounded. But the duck were too wary ever 
to let us get within range of them. As we drew gently 
near, they rose in black throngs, and skimmed low into 
the distance of the wintry landscape, trailing their 
legs behind them, like the duck on the wall of Kom 
Ombos. There was no duck for dinner in camp that 
night, and the cook was inconsolable. But I had 

207 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

seen a relief come to life, and surmounted my dis- 
appointment. 

Kom Ombos and Edfu, the two houses of the lovers 
and haters of crocodiles, or at least of the lovers and 
the haters of their worship, I shall always think of them 
together, because I drifted on the Loulia from one to the 
other, and saw no interesting temple between them, and 
because their personalities are as opposed as were, 
centuries ago, the tenets of those who adored within 
them. The Egyptians of old were devoted to the 
hunting of crocodiles, which once abounded in the 
reaches of the Nile between Assuan and Luxor, and 
also much lower down. But I believe that no reliefs, 
or paintings, of this sport are to be found upon the 
walls of the temples and the tombs. The fear of Sebek, 
perhaps, prevailed even over the dwellers about the 
temple of Edfu. Yet how could fear of any crocodile 
god infect the souls of those who were privileged to 
worship in such a temple, or even reverently to stand 
under the colonnade within the court ? As well, per- 
haps, one might ask how men could be inspired to 
raise such a perfect building to a deity with the face of 
a hawk? But Horus was not the god of crocodiles, 
but a god of the sun. And his power to inspire men 
must have been vast ; for the greatest conception in 
stone in Egypt, and, I suppose, in the whole world, 
the Sphinx, as De Rouge proved by an inscription at 
Edfu, was a representation of Horus transformed to 

208 



KOM OMBOS 

conquer Typhon. The Sphinx and Edfu! For such 
marvels we ought to bless the hawk-headed god. And 
if we forget the hawk, which one meets so perpetually 
upon the walls of tombs and temples, and identify 
Horus rather with the Greek Apollo, the yellow-haired 
god of the sun, driving "westerly all day in his flaming 
chariot," and shooting his golden arrows at the happy 
world beneath, we can be at peace with those dead 
Egyptians. For every pilgrim who goes to Edfu to- 
day is surely a worshiper of the solar aspect of Horus. 
As long as the world lasts there will be sun-worship- 
ers. Every brown man upon the Nile is one, and 
every good American who crosses the ocean and comes 
at last into the somber wonder of Edfu, and I was one 
upon the deck of the Loiilia. 

And we all worship as yet in the dark, as in the ex- 
quisite dark, like faith, of the Holy of Holies of Horus. 



2 I I 



XVI 

PHIL^ 

^ S I drew slowly nearer and nearer to the home 
/ % of "the great Enchantress," or, as I sis was 
-Z lk_ also called in bygone days, " the Lady of 
Philae," the land began to change in character, to be full 
of a new and barbaric meaning. In recent years I have 
paid many visits to northern Africa, but only to Tunisia 
and Algeria, countries that are wilder-looking, and 
much wilder-seeming, than Egypt. Now, as I ap- 
proached Assuan, I seemed at last to be also approach- 
ing the real, the intense Africa that I had known in the 
Sahara, the enigmatic siren, savage and strange and 
wonderful, whom the typical Ouled Nail, crowned with 
gold, and tufted with ostrich plumes, painted with kohl, 
tattooed, and perfumed, hung with golden coins and 
amulets, and framed in plaits of coarse, false hair, rep- 
resents indifferently to the eyes of the traveling stranger. 
For at last I saw the sands that I love creeping down 
to the banks of the Nile. And they brought with them 
that wonderful air which belongs only to them — the 
air that dwells among the dunes in the solitary places^ 
that is like the cool touch of Liberty upon the face of a 

2 12 



PHIL.^ 

man, that makes the brown child of the nomad as Hthe, 
tireless, and fierce-spirited as a young panther, and sets 
flames in the eyes of the Arab horse, and gives speed 
of the wind to the Sloughi. The true lover of the 
desert can never rid his soul of its passion for the 
sands, and now my heart leaped as I stole into their 
pure embraces, as I saw to right and left amber curves 
and sheeny recesses, shining ridges and bloomy clefts. 
The clean delicacy of those sands that, in long and 
elowinsf hills, stretched out from Nubia to meet me, 
who could ever describe them? Who could ever de- 
scribe their soft and enticing shapes, their exquisite 
gradations of color, the little shadows in their hollows, 
the fiery beauty of their crests, the patterns the cool 
winds make upon them? It is an enchanted royaitme 
of the sands through which one approaches Isis. 

Isis and engineers! We English people have effected 
that curious introduction, and we greaUy pride our- 
selves upon it. We have presented Sir William Gar- 
stin, and Mr. John Blue, and Mr. Fitz Maurice, and 
other clever, hard-working men to the fabled Lady of 
Philae, and they have given her a gift : a dam two thou- 
sand yards in length, upon which tourists go smiling 
on trolleys. Isis has her expensive tribute, — it cost 
about a million and a half pounds, — and no doubt she 
ought to be gratified. 

Yet I think Isis mourns on altered Philse, as she 
mourns with her sister, Nepthys, at the heads of so 

215 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

many mummies of Osirians upon the walls of Egyptian 
tombs. And though the fellaheen very rightly rejoice, 
there are some unpractical sentimentalists who form a 
company about her, and make their plaint with hers — 
their plaint for the peace that is gone, for the lost calm, 
the departed poetry, that once hung, like a delicious, 
like an inimitable, atmosphere, about the palms of the 
" Holy Island." 

I confess that I dreaded to revisit Philae. I had 
sweet memories of the island that had been with me 
for many years — memories of still mornings under the 
palm-trees, watching the gliding waters of the river, or 
gazing across them to the long sweep of the empty 
sands; memories of drowsy, golden noons, when the 
bright world seemed softly sleeping, and the almost 
daffodil-colored temple dreamed under the quivering 
canopy of blue; memories of evenings when a bene- 
diction from the lifted hands of Romance surely fell 
upon the temple and the island and the river; memories 
of moonlit nights, when the spirits of the old gods to 
whom the temples were reared surely held converse 
with the spirits of the desert, with Mirage and her pale 
and evading sisters of the great spaces, under the bril- 
liant stars. I was afraid, because I could not believe 
the asseverations of certain practical persons, full of 
the hard and almost angry desire of "Progress," that 
no harm had been done by the creation of the reservoir, 
but that, on the contrary, it had benefited the temple. 

216 



PHILJE 

The action of the water upon the stone, they said with 
vehement voices, instead of loosening it and causing it 
to crumble untimely away, had tended to harden and 
consolidate it. Here I should like to lie, but I resist 
the temptation. Monsieur Naville has stated that pos- 
sibly the English engineers have helped to prolong the 
lives of the buildings of Philae, and Monsieur Maspero 
has declared that "the state of the temple of Philas be- 
comes continually more satisfactory." So be it! Lon- 
gevity has been, by a happy chance, secured. But 
what of beauty ? What of the beauty of the past, and 
what of the schemes for the future ? Is Philae even to 
be left as it is, or are the waters of the Nile to be arti- 
ficially raised still higher, until Philae ceases to be ? 
Soon, no doubt, an answer will be given. 

Meanwhile, instead of the little island that I knew, 
and thought a little paradise breathing out enchantment 
in the midst of titanic sterility, I found a something 
diseased. Philae now, when out of the water, as it 
was all the time when I was last in Egypt, looks like a 
thing stricken with some creeping malady — one of 
those maladies which begin in the lower members of a 
body, and Avork their way gradually but inexorably 
upward to the trunk, until they attain the heart. 

I came to it by the desert, and descended to Shellal 
— Shellal with its railway-station, its workmen's build- 
ings, its tents, its dozens of screens to protect the 
hewers of stone from the burning rays of the sun, its 

219 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

bustle of people, of overseers, engineers, and work- 
men, Egyptian, Nubian, Italian, and Greek. The 
silence I had known was gone, though the desert lay 
all around — the great sands, the great masses of granite 
that look as if patiently waiting to be fashioned into 
obelisks, and sarcophagi, and statues. But away there 
across the bend of the river, dominating the ugly rum- 
mage of this intrusive beehive of human bees, sheer 
grace overcoming strength both of nature and human 
nature, rose the fabled "Pharaoh's Bed"; gracious, 
tender, from Shellal most delicately perfect, and glow- 
ing with pale gold against the grim background of the 
hills on the western shore. It seemed to plead for 
mercy, like something feminine threatened with outrage, 
to protest through its mere beauty, as a woman might 
protest by an attitude, against further desecration. 

And in the distance the Nile roared through the 
many gates of the dam, making answer to the protest. 

What irony was in this scene ! In the old days of 
Egypt Philae was sacred ground, was the Nile-protected 
home of sacerdotal mysteries, was a veritable Mecca to 
the believers in Osiris, to which it was forbidden even to 
draw near without permission. The ancient Egyptians 
swore solemnly "By him who sleeps in Phite." Now 
they sometimes swear angrily at him who wakes in, or 
at least by, Philae, and keeps them steadily going at 
their appointed tasks. And instead of it being forbid- 
den to draw near to a sacred spot, needy men from 

220 



PHILJE 

foreign countries flock thither in eager crowds, not to 
worship in beauty, but to earn a Hving wage. 

And "Pharaoh's Bed" looks out over the water and 
seems to wonder what will be the end. 

I was glad to escape from Shellal, pursued by the 
shriek of an engine announcing its departure from the 
station, glad to be on the quiet water, to put it between 
me and that crowd of busy workers. Before me I saw 
a vast lake, not unlovely, where once the Nile flowed 
swiftly, far off a gray smudge — the very damnable 
dam. All around me was a grim and cruel world of 
rocks, and of hills that look almost like heaps of rub- 
bish, some of them gray, some of them in color so dark 
that they resemble the lava torrents petrified near 
Catania, or the "black country"' in England through 
which one rushes on one's way to the North. Just 
here and there, sweetly almost as the pink blossoms of 
the wild oleander, which I have seen from Sicilian seas 
lifting their heads from the crevices of sea rocks, the 
amber and rosy sands of Nubia smiled down over grit 
stone and granite. 

The setting of Philae is severe. Even in bright sun- 
shine it has an iron look. On a gray or stormy day it 
would be forbidding or even terrible. In the old win- 
ters and springs one loved Phila; the more because of 
the contrast of its setting with its own lyrical beauty, 
its curious tenderness of charm — a charm in which the 
isle itself was mingled with its buildings. But now, 

223 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

and before my boat had touched the quay, I saw that 
the island must be ignored — -if possible. 

The water with which it is entirely covered during a 
great part of the year seems to have cast a blight upon 
it. The very few palms have a drooping and tragic 
air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and 
much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome- 
looking plants, which seem crouching down as if 
ashamed of their brutal exposure by the receded river, 
and of harsh and yellow-green grass, unattractive to 
the eyes. As I stepped on shore I felt as if I were 
stepping on disease. But at least there were the build- 
ings undisturbed by any outrage. Again I turned 
toward " Pharaoh's Bed," toward the temple standing 
apart from it, which already I had seen from the desert, 
near Shellal, gleaming with its gracious sand-yellow, 
lifting its series of straight lines of masonry above the 
river and the rocks, looking, from a distance, very 
simple, with a simplicity like that of clear water, but as 
enticing as the light on the first real day of spring. 

I went first to " Pharaoh's Bed." 

Imagine a woman with a perfectly lovely face, with 
features as exquisitely proportioned as those, say, of 
Praxiteles's statue of the Cnidian Aphrodite, for which 
King- Nicomedes was willing to remit the entire national 
debt of Cnidus, and with a warmly white rose-leaf com- 
plexion — one of those complexions one sometimes sees 
in Italian women, colorless, yet suggestive almost of glow, 

224. 



FHILJE 

of purity, with the flame of passion behind it. Imagine 
that woman attacked by a malady which leaves her fea- 
tures exactly as they were, but which changes the color 
of her face — from the throat upward to just beneath the 
nose — from the warm white to a mottled, grayish hue. 
Imagine the line that would seem to be traced between 
the two complexions — the mottled gray below the 
warm white still glowing above. Imagine this, and you 
have " Pharaoh's Bed " and the temple of Philae as they 
are to-day. 



227 



XVII 
"PHARAOH'S BED" 

PHARAOH'S BED," which stands alone close to 
the Nile on the eastern side of the island, is not 
one of those rugged, majestic buildings, full of 
grandeur and splendor, which can bear, can " carry off," 
as it were, a cruelly imposed ugliness without being af- 
fected as a whole. It is, on the contrary, a small, almost 
an airy, and a femininely perfect thing, in which a singu- 
lar loveliness of form was combined with a singular 
loveliness of color. The spell it threw over you was not 
so much a spell woven of details as a spell woven of 
divine uniformity. To put it in very practical language, 
"Pharaoh's Bed " was " all of a piece." The form was 
married to the color. The color seemed to melt into the 
form. It was indeed a bed in which the soul that wor- 
ships beauty could rest happily entranced. Nothing 
jarred. Antiquaries say that apparently this building 
was left unfinished. That may be so. But for all that 
it was one of the most finished things in Egypt, essen- 
tially a thing to inspire within one the " perfect calm 
that is Greek." The blighting touch of the Nile, which 
has changed the beautiful pale yellow of the stone of 

228 



"PHARAOH'S BED" 

the lower part of the building to a hideous and dreary 
gray, — which made me think of a steel knife on which 
liquid has been spilt and allowed to run, — has destroyed 
the uniformity, the balance, the faultless melody lifted 
up by form and color. And so it is with the temple. 
It is as it were cut in two by the intrusion into it of this 
hideous, mottled complexion left by the receded water. 
Everywhere one sees disease on walls and columns, 
almost blotting out bas-reliefs, giving to their active 
figures a morbid, a sickly look. The effect is specially 
distressing in the open court that precedes the temple 
dedicated to the Lady of Philae. In this court, which 
is at the southern end of the island, the Nile at certain 
seasons is now forced to rise very nearly as high as the 
capitals of many of the columns. The consequence of 
this is that here the disease seems making rapid strides. 
One feels it is drawing near to the heart, and that the 
poor, doomed invalid may collapse at any moment. 

Yes, there is much to make one sad at Philae. But 
how much of pure beauty there is left — of beauty that 
mutely protests against any further outrage ! 

As there is something epic in the grandeur of the 
Lotus Hall at Karnak, so there is something lyrical in 
the soft charm of the Philae temple. Certain things or 
places, certain things in certain places, always suggest 
to my mind certain people in whose genius I take de- 
light — who have won me, and moved me by their art. 
Whenever I go to Philae, the name of Shelley comes to 

231 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

me. I scarcely could tell why. I have no special 
reason to connect Shelley with Philae. But when I see 
that almost airy loveliness of stone, so simply elegant, 
so, somehow, spring-like in its pale-colored beauty, its 
happy, daffodil charm, with its touch of the Greek, — 
the sensitive hand from Attica stretched out over 
Nubia, — I always think of Shelley. I think of Shelley 
the youth who dived down into the pool so deep that 
it seemed he was lost forever to the sun. I think of 
Shelley the poet, full of a lyric ecstasy, who was himself 
like an embodied 

Longing for something afar 
From the sphere of our sorrow. 

Lyrical Philae is like a temple of dreams, and of all 
poets Shelley might have dreamed the dream, and have 
told it to the world in a song. 

For all its solidity, there are a strange lightness and 
grace in the temple of Philae; there is an elegance you 
will not find in the other temples of Egypt. But it is 
an elegance quite undefiled by weakness, by any senti- 
mentality. (Even a building, like a love-lorn maid, can 
be sentimental.) Edward Fitzgerald once defined taste 
as the feminine of genius. Taste prevails in Philae, a 
certain delicious femininity that seduces the eyes and 
the heart of man. Shall we call it the spirit of Isis? 

I have heard a clever critic and antiquarian declare 
that he is not very fond of Philae ; that he feels a cer- 

232 



"PHARAOH'S BED" 

tain "spuriousness " in the temple due to the minghng 
of Greek with Egyptian influences. He may be right. 
I am no antiquarian, and, as a mere lover of beauty, I 
do not feel this "spuriousness." I can see neither two 
quarreling strengths nor any weakness caused by di- 
vision. I suppose I see only the beauty, as I might 
see only the beauty of a woman bred of a handsome 
father and mother of different races, and who, not 
typical of either, combined in her features and figure 
distinguishing merits of both. It is true that there is a 
particular pleasure which is roused in us only by the ab- 
solutely typical — the completely thoroughbred person 
or thing. It may be a pleasure not caused by beauty, 
and it may be very keen, nevertheless. When it is 
combined with the joy roused in us by all beauty, it is a 
very pure emotion of exceptional delight. Philae does 
not, perhaps, give this emotion. But it certainly has a 
lovableness that attaches the heart in a quite singular 
degree. The Philae-lover is the most faithful of lovers. 
The hold of his mistress upon him, once it has been 
felt, is never relaxed. And in his affection for Philas 
there is, I think, nearly always a rainbow strain of 
romance. 

When we love anything, we love to be able to say 
of the object of our devotion, "There is nothing like 
it." Now, in all Egypt, and I suppose in all the world, 
there is nothing just like Philse. There are temples, 
yes ; but where else is there a bouquet of gracious 

235 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

buildings such as these gathered in such a holder as 
this tiny, raft-like isle? And where else are just such 
delicate and, as I have said, light and almost feminine 
elegance and charm set in the midst of such severe 
sterility? Once, beyond Philae, the Great Cataract 
roared down from the wastes of Nubia into the green 
fertility of Upper Egypt. It roars no longer. But 
still the masses of the rocks, and still the amber and 
the yellow sands, and still the iron-colored hills, keep 
guard round Philae. And still, despite the vulgar des- 
ecration that has turned Shellal into a workmen's 
suburb and dowered it with a railway-station, there is 
mystery in Philae, and the sense of isolation that only 
an island gives. Even now one can forget in Phila? — 
forget, after a while, and in certain parts of its buildings, 
the presence of the gray disease ; forget the threatening 
of the altruists, who desire to benefit humanity by 
clearing as much beauty out of humanity's abiding- 
place as possible ; forget the fact of the railway, except 
when the shriek of the engine floats over the water to 
one's ears ; forget economic problems, and the destruc-/ 
tion that their solving brings upon the silent world of 
things whose "use," denied, unrecognized, or laughed 
at, to man is in their holy beauty, whose mission lies 
not upon the broad highways where tramps the hungry 
body, but upon the secret, shadowy byways where 
glides the hungry soul. 

Yes, one can forget even now in the hall of the tem- 
236 



"PHARAOH'S BED" 

pie of I sis, where the capricious graces of form are 
Hnked with the capricious graces of color, where, like 
old and delicious music in the golden strings of a harp, 
dwells a something — what is it? A murmur, or a per- 
fume, or a breathing? — of old and vanished years 
when forsakened gods were worshiped. And one can 
forget in the chapel of Hathor, on whose wall little 
Horus is born, and in the gray hounds' chapel beside 
it. One can forget, for one walks in beauty. 

Lovely are the doorways in PhiL-e; enticing are the 
shallow steps that lead one onward and upward ; gra- 
cious the yellow towers that seem to smile a quiet wel- 
come. And there is one chamber that is simply a place 
of magic — the hall of the painted portico, the delicious 
hall of the flowers. 

It is this chamber which always makes me think of 
Philae as a lovely temple of dreams, this silent, retired 
chamber, where some fabled princess might well have 
been touched to a long, long sleep of enchantment, and 
lain for years upon years among the magical flowers — 
the lotus, and the palm, and the papyrus. 

In my youth it made upon me an indelible impres- 
sion. Through intervening years, filled with many new 
impressions, many wanderings, many visions of beauty 
in other lands, that retired,- painted chamber had not 
faded from my mind — or shall I say from my heart? 
There had seemed to me within it something that was 
ineffable, as in a lyric of Shelley's there is something 

239 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

that is ineffable, or in certain pictures of Boecklin, such 
as "The Villa by the Sea." And when at last, almost 
afraid and hesitating, I came into it once more, I found 
in it again the strange spell of old enchantment. 

It seems as if this chamber had been imagined by a 
poet, who had set it in the center of the temple of his 
dream. It is such a spontaneous chamber that one can 
scarcely imagine it more than a day and a night in the 
building. Yet in detail it is lovely ; it is finished and 
strangely mighty ; it is a lyric in stone, the most poeti- 
cal chamber, perhaps, in the whole of Egypt. For 
Philae I count in Egypt, though really it is in Nubia. 

One who has not seen Philae may perhaps wonder 
how a tall chamber of solid stone, containing heavy and 
soaring columns, can be like a lyric of Shelley's, can be 
exquisitely spontaneous, and yet hold a something of 
mystery that makes one tread softly in it, and fear to 
disturb within it some lovely sleeper of Nubia, some 
Princess of the Nile. He must continue to wonder. 
To describe this chamber calmly, as I might, for in- 
stance, describe the temple of Derr, would be simply to 
destroy it. For things ineffable cannot be fully ex- 
plained, or not be fully felt by those the twilight of 
whose dreams is fitted to mingle with their twilight. 
They who are meant to love with ardor se passionnent 
pour la passion. And they who are meant to take and 
to keep the spirit of a dream, whether it be hidden in a 
poem, or held in the cup of a flower, or enfolded in 

240 



"PHARAOH'S BED" 

arms of stone, will surely never miss it, even though 
they can hear roaring loudly above its elfin voice the 
cry of directed waters rushing down to Upper Egypt. 

How can one disentangle from their tapestry web the 
different threads of a spell? And even if one could, if 
one could hold them up, and explain, " The cause of the 
spell is that this comes in contact with this, and that 
this, which I show you, blends with, fades into, this," 
how could it advantage any one ? Nothing would be 
made clearer, nothing be really explained. The in- 
effable is, and must ever remain, something remote and 
mysterious. 

And so one may say many things of this painted 
chamber of Phil^e, and yet never convey, perhaps never 
really know, the innermost cause of its charm. In it 
there is obvious beauty of form, and a seizing beauty 
of color, beauty of sunlight and shadow, of antique 
association. This turquoise blue is enchanting, and 
Isis was worshiped here. What has the one to do with 
the other ? Nothing ; and yet how much ! For is not 
each of these facts a thread in the tapestry web of the 
spell ? The eyes see the rapture of this very perfect 
blue. The imagination hears, as if very far off, the 
solemn chanting of priests, and smells the smoke of 
strange perfumes, and sees the long, aquiline nose and 
the thin, haughty lips of the goddess. And the color 
becomes strange to the eyes, as well as very lovely, be- 
cause, perhaps, it was there — it almost certainly was 

243 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

there — when from Constantinople went forth the de- 
cree that all Egypt should be Christian ; when the 
priests of the sacred brotherhood of Isis were driven 
from their temple. 

Isis nursing Horus gave way to the Virgin and the 
child. But the cycles spin away down " the ringing 
grooves of change." From Egypt has passed away 
that decreed Christianity. Now from the minaret the 
muezzin cries, and in palm-shaded villages I hear the 
loud hymns of earnest pilgrims starting on the journey 
to Mecca. And ever this painted chamber shelters its 
mystery of poetry, its mystery of charm. And still its 
marvelous colors are fresh as in the far-off pagan days, 
and the opening lotus-floAvers, and the closed lotus- 
buds, and the palm and the papyrus, are on the perfect 
columns. And their intrinsic loveliness, and their 
freshness, and their age, and the mysteries they have 
looked on — all these facts are part of the spell that gov- 
erns us to-day. In Edfu one is inclosed in a won- 
derful austerity. And one can only worship. In Philae 
one is wrapped in a radiance of color. And one can 
only dream. Eor there is coral pink, and there a won- 
derful green, " like the green light that lingers in the 
west," and there is a blue as deep as the blue of a 
tropical sea; and there are green-blue and lustrous, 
ardent red. And the odd fantasy in the coloring, is 
not that like the fantasy in the temple of a dream? Eor 
those who painted these capitals for the greater glory 

244 



"PHARAOH'S BED" 

of I sis did not fear to depart from nature, and to their 
patient worship a blue pahn perhaps seemed a rarely 
sacred thing. And that palm is part of the spell, and 
the reliefs upon the walls, and even the Coptic crosses 
that are cut into the stone. 

But, at the end, one can only say that this place is 
indescribable, and not because it is complex or ter- 
rifically grand, like Karnak. Go to it on a sunlit morn- 
ing, or stand in it in late afternoon, and perhaps you 
will feel that it " suggests " you, that it carries you 
away, out of familiar regions into a land of dreams, 
where among hidden ways the soul is lost in magic. 
Yes, you are gone. 

To the right — for one, alas ! cannot live in a dream 
forever — is a lovely doorway through which one sees 
the river. Facing it is another doorway, showing a 
fragment of the poor, vivisected island, some ruined 
walls, and still another doorway in which, again, is 
framed the Nile. Many people have cut their names 
upon the walls of Philze. Once, as I sat alone there, I 
felt strongly attracted to look upward to a wall, as if 
some personality, enshrined within the stone, were 
watching me, or calling. I looked, and saw written 
"Balzac." 

Philae is the last temple that one visits before he 
gives himself to the wildness of the solitudes of 
Nubia. It stands at the very frontier. As one goes 
up the Nile, it is like a smiling adieu from the Egypt 

247 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

one is leaving. As one comes down, it is like a smiling 
welcome. In its delicate charm I feel something of the 
charm of the Egyptian character. There are moments, 
indeed, when I identify Egypt with Philas. For in 
Philae one must dream ; and on the Nile, too, one must 
dream. And always the dream is happy, and shot 
through with radiant light — light that is as radiant as 
the colors in Philas's temple. The pylons of Ptolemy 
smile at you as you go up or come down the river. 
And the people of Egypt smile as they enter into your 
dream. A suavity, too, is theirs. I think of them often 
as artists, who know their parts in the dream-play, who 
know exactly their function, and how to fulfil it rightly. 
They sing, while you are dreaming, but it is an under- 
song, like the murrnur of an Eastern river far off from' 
any sea. It never disturbs, this music, but it helps you 
in your dream. And they are softly gay. And in 
their eyes there is often the gleam of sunshine, for they 
are the children — but not grown men — of the sun. 
That, indeed, is one of the many strange things in 
Egypt — the youthfulness of its age, the childlikeness 
of its almost terrible antiquity. One goes there to look 
at the oldest things in the world and to feel perpetually 
young — young as Philse is young, as a lyric of Shel- 
ley's is young, as all of our day-dreams are young, as 
the people of Egypt are young. 

Oh, that Egypt could be kept as it is, even as it is 
now; that Philae could be preserved even as it is now ! 

248 



"PHARAOH'S BED" 

The spoilers are there, those bhthe modern spirits, so 
frightfully clever and capable, so industrious, so de- 
termined, so unsparing of themselves and — of others! 
Already they are at work "benefiting Egypt." Tall 
chimneys begin to vomit smoke along the Nile. A 
damnable tram-line for little trolleys leads one toward 
the wonderful Colossi of Memnon. Close to Kom Om- 
bos some soul imbued with romance has had the inspi- 
ration to set up — a factory. And Philas — is it to go? 

Is beauty, then, of no value in the world? Is it al- 
ways to be the prey of modern progress? Is nothing 
to be considered sacred; nothing to be left untouched, 
unsmirched by the grimy fingers of improvement ? I 
suppose nothing. 

Then let those who still care to dream go now to 
Philas's painted chamber by the long reaches of the 
Nile; go on, if they will, to the giant forms of Abu- 
Simbel among the Nubian sands. And perhaps they 
will think with me, that in some dreams there is a value 
greater than the value that is entered in any bank-book, 
and they will say, with me, however uselessly : 

" Leave to the world some dreams, some places in 
which to dream ; for if it needs dams to make the grain 
grow in the stretches of land that were barren, and rail- 
ways, and tram-lines, and factory chimneys that vomit 
black smoke in the face of the sun, surely it needs also 
painted chambers of Philas and the silence that comes 
down from I sis." 



XVIII 
OLD CAIRO 

BY old Cairo I do not mean only "le vieux Caire" 
of the guide-book, the little, desolate village 
containing the famous Coptic church of Abu Ser- 
gius, in the crypt of which the Virgin Mary and Christ are ■ 
said to have stayed when they fled to the land of Egypt 
to escape the fury of King Herod; but the Cairo that 
is not new, that is not dedicated wholly to officialdom 
and tourists, that, in the midst of changes and the ad- 
vance of civilization, — civilization that does so much 
harm as well as so much good, that showers benefits 
with one hand and defaces beauty with the other, — pre- 
serves its immemorial calm or immemorial tumult; that 
stands aloof, as stands aloof ever the Eastern from the 
Western man, even in the midstof what seems, perhaps, 
like intimacy ; Eastern to the soul, though the fantasies, 
the passions, the vulgarities, the brilliant ineptitudes of 
the West, beat about it like waves about some unyield- 
inor wall of the sea. 

o 

When I went back to Egypt, after a lapse of many 
years, I fled at once from Cairo, and upon the long 
reaches of the Nile, in the great spaces of the Libyan 

252 



OLD CAIRO 

Desert, in the luxuriant palm-i^rovcs of the Fayyum, 
among the tamarisk-bushes and on the pale waters of 
Kurun, I forgot the changes which, in my brief glimpse 
of the city and its environs, had moved me to despon- 
dency. But one cannot live in the solitudes forever. 
And at last from Madi-nat-al-b^ayyum, with the first 
pilgrims starting for Mecca, I returned to the great city, 
determined to seek in it once more for the fascinations 
it used to hold, and perhaps still held in the hidden 
ways where modern feet, nearly always in a hurry, had 
seldom time to penetrate. 

A mist hung over the land. Out of it, with a sort of 
stern energy, there came to my ears loud hymns sung 
by thepilgrim voices — hymns in which, mingled with the 
enthusiasm of devotees en route for the holiest shrine 
of their faith, there seemed to sound the resolution of 
men strung up to confront the fatigues and the dangers 
of a great journey through a wild and unknown country. 
Those hymns led my feet to the venerable mosques 
of Cairo, the city of mosques, guided me on my les- 
ser pilgrimage among the cupolas and the colonnades, 
where grave men dream in the silence near marble 
fountains, or bend muttering their prayers beneath 
domes that are dimmed by the ruthless fingers of Time. 
In the buildings consecrated to prayer and to medita- 
tion I first sought for the magic that stills lurks in the 
teeming bosom of Cairo. 

Long ago I had sought it elsewhere, in the brilliant 

253 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

bazaars by day, and by night in tlie winding alleys, 
wliere the dark-eyed Jews looked stealthily forth from 
the low-browed doorways ; where the Circassian girls 
promenade, gleaming with golden coins and barbaric 
jewels ; where the air is alive with music that is feverish 
and antique, and in strangely lighted interiors one sees 
forms clad in brilliant draperies, or severely draped in 
the simplest pale-blue garments, moving in languid 
da;nces, fluttering painted fingers, bending, swaying, 
dropping down, like the forms that people a dream. 

In the bazaars is the passion for gain, in the alleys 
of music and light is the passion for pleasure, in the 
mosques is the passion for prayer that connects the souls 
of men with the unseen but strongly felt world. Each 
of these passions is old, each of these passions in the 
heart of Islam is fierce. On my return to Cairo I 
sought for the hidden fire that is magic in the dusky 
places of prayer. 

A mist lay over the city as I stood in a narrow byway, 
and gazed up at a heavy lattice, of which the decayed 
and blackened wood seemed on guard before some 
tragic or weary secret. Before me was the entrance to 
the mosque of Ibn-Tulun, older than any mosque in 
Cairo save only the mosque of Amru. It is approached 
by a flight of steps, on each side of which stand old, 
impenetrable houses. Above my head, strung across 
from one house to the other, were many little red and 
yellow flags ornamented with gold lozenges. These 

254 



OLD CAIRO 

were to bear witness that in a couple of days' time, from 
the great open place beneath the citadel of Cairo, the 
Sacred Carpet was to set out on its long journey to 
Mecca. My guide struck on a door and uttered a fierce 
cry. A small shutter in the blackened lattice was 
opened, and a young girl, with kohl-tinted eyelids, and 
a brilliant yellow handkerchief tied over her coarse, 
black hair, leaned out, held a short parley, and vanished, 
drawing the shutter to behind her. The mist crept up 
about the tawdry flags, a heavy door creaked, whined 
on its hinges, and from the house of the girl there came 
an old, fat man bearing a mighty key. In a moment I 
was free of the mosque of Ibn-Tulun. 

I ascended the steps, passed through a doorway, and 
found myself on a piece of waste ground, flanked on the 
right by an old, mysterious wall, and on the left by the 
long wall of the mosque, from which close to me rose a 
gray, unornamented minaret, full of the plain dignity of 
unpretending age. Upon its summit was perched a 
large and weary-looking bird with draggled feathers, 
which remained so still that it seemed to be a sad orna- 
ment set there above the city, and watching it forever 
with eyes that could not see. At right angles, touching 
the mosque, was such a house as one can see only 
in the East — fantastically old, fantastically decayed, 
bleared, discolored, filthy, melancholy, showing hideous 
windows like windows in the slum of a town set above 
coal-pits in a colliery district, a degraded house, and 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

yet a house which roused the imagination and drove it 
to its work. In this building once dwelt the High 
Priest of the mosque. This dwelling, the ancient wall, 
the gray minaret with its motionless bird, the lamentable 
waste ground at my feet, prepared me rightly to appre- 
ciate the bit of old Cairo I had come to see. 

People who are bored by Gothic churches would not 
love the mosque of Ibn-Tulun. No longer is it used 
for worship. It contains no praying life. Abandoned, 
bare, and devoid of all lovely ornament, it stands like 
some hoary patriarch, naked and calm, waiting its 
destined end without impatience and without fear. It 
is a fatalistic mosque, and is impressive, like a fatalistic 
man. The great court of it, three hundred feet square, 
with pointed arches supported by piers, double, and on 
the side looking toward Mecca quintuple arcades, has a 
great dignity of somber simplicity. Not grace, not a 
light elegance or soaring beauty, but massiveness and 
heavy strength are the distinguishing features of this 
mosque. Even the octagonal basin and its protecting 
cupola that stand in the middle of the court lack the 
charm that belongs to so many of the fountains of Cairo. 
There are two minarets, the minaret of the bird, and a 
larger one, approached by a big stairway up which, so 
my dragoman told me, a Sultan whose name I have 
forgotten loved to ride his favorite horse. Upon the 
summit of this minaret I stood for a long time, looking 
down over the city. 

256 



OLD CAIRO 

Gray it was that morning, almost as London is gray ; 
but the sounds that came up softly to my ears out of 
the mist were not the sounds of London. Those many 
minarets, almost like columns of fog rising above the 
cupolas, spoke to me of the East even upon this sad 
and sunless morning. Once from where I was stand- 
ing at the time appointed, went forth the call to prayer, 
and in the barren court beneath me there were crowds 
of ardent worshipers. Stern men paced upon the huge 
terrace just at my feet fingering their beads, and under 
that heavy cupola were made the long ablutions of the 
faithful. But now no man comes to this old place, no 
murmur to God disturbs the heavy silence. And the 
silence, and the emptiness, and the grayness under the 
long arcades, all seem to make a tremulous proclama- 
tion ; all seem to whisper, " I am very old, I am useless, 
I cumber the earth." Even the mosque of Amru, which 
stands also on ground that looks gone to waste, near 
dingy and squat houses built with gray bricks, seems 
less old than this mosque of Ibn-Tulun. For its long 
facade is striped with white and apricot, and there are 
lebbek-trees growing in its court near the two columns 
between which if you can pass you are assured of hea- 
ven. But the mosque of Ibn-Tulun, seen upon a sad 
day, makes a powerful impression, and from the summit 
of its minaret you are summoned by the many minarets 
of Cairo to make the pilgrimage of the mosques, to pass 
from the "broken arches" of these Saracenic cloisters 
257 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

to the "Blue Mosque," the "Red Mosque," the mosques 
of Mohammed AH, of Sultan Hassan, of Kait Bey, of 
El-Azhar, and so on to the Coptic church that is the 
silent center of "old Cairo." It is said that there are 
over four hundred mosques in Cairo. As I looked 
down from the minaret of Ibn-Tulun, they called me 
through the mist that blotted completely out all the 
surrounding country, as if it would concentrate my at- 
tention upon the places of prayer during these holy days 
when the pilgrims were crowding in to depart with the 
Holy Carpet. And I went down by the staircase of 
the horse, and in the mist I made my pilgrimage. 

As every one who visits Rome goes to St. Peter's, 
so every one who visits Cairo goes to the mosque of 
Mohammed Ali in the citadel, a gorgeous building in a 
magnificent situation, the interior of which always makes 
me think of court functions, and of the pomp of life, 
rather than of prayer and self-denial. More attractive 
to me is the "Blue Mosque," to which I returned again 
and again, enticed almost as by the fascination of the 
living blue of a summer sky. 

This mosque, which is the mosque of Ibrahim Aga, 
but which is familiarly known to its lovers as the "Blue 
Mosque," lies to the left of a ramshackle street, and 
from the outside does not look specially inviting. Even 
when I passed through its door, and stood in the court 
beyond, at first I felt not its charm. All looked old and 
rough, unkempt and in confusion. The red and white 

258 



OLD CAIRO 

stripes of the walls and the arches of the arcade, the 
mean little place for ablution, — a pipe and a row of 
brass taps, — led the mind from a Neapolitan ice to a 
second-rate school, and for a moment I thought of 
abruptly retiring and seeking more splendid precincts. 
And then I looked across the court to the arcade that 
lay beyond, and I saw the exquisite "love color" of the 
marvelous tiles that gives this mosque its name. 

The huge pillars of this arcade are striped and ugly, 
but between them shone, with an ineffable luster, a 
wall of purple and blue, of purple and blue so strong 
and yet so delicate that it held the eyes and drew the 
body forward. If ever color calls, it calls in the blue 
mosque of Ibrahim Aga. And when I had crossed the 
court, when I stood beside the pulpit, with its delicious, 
wooden folding-doors, and studied the tiles of which 
this wonderful wall is composed, I found them as lovely 
near as they are lovely far off. From a distance they re- 
semble a nature effect, are almost like a bit of Southern 
sea or of sky, a fragment of gleaming Mediterranean 
seen through the pillars of a loggia, or of Sicilian blue 
watching over Etna in the long summer days. When 
one is close to them, they are a miracle of art. The 
background of them is a milky white upon which is an 
elaborate pattern of purple and blue, generally con- 
ventional and representative of no known object, but 
occasionally showing tall trees somewhat resembling 
cypresses. But it is impossible in words adequately to 

259 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

describe the effect of these tiles, and of the tiles that 
line to the very roof the tomb-house on the right of the 
court. They are like a cry of ecstasy going up in this 
otherwise not very beautiful mosque ; they make it un- 
forgetable, they draw you back to it again and yet 
again. On the darkest day of Avinter they set some- 
thing of summer there. In the saddest moment they 
proclaim the fact that there is joy in the world, that 
there was joy in the hearts of creative artists years 
upon years ago. If you are ever in Cairo, and sink 
into depression, go to the "Blue Mosque" and see if it 
does not have upon you an uplifting moral effect. And 
then, if you like, go on from it to the GamiaEl Movayad, 
sometimes called El Ahmar, "The Red," where you 
will find greater glories, though no greater fascination ; for 
the tiles hold their own among all the wonders of Cairo. 
Outside the " Red Mosque," by its imposing and 
lofty wall, there is always an assemblage of people, for 
prayers go up in this mosque, ablutions are made there, 
and the floor of the arcade is often covered with men 
studying the Koran, calmly meditating, or prostrating 
themselves in prayer. And so there is a great coming 
and going up the outside stairs and through the won- 
derful doorway: beggars crouch under the wall of the 
terrace ; the sellers of cakes, of syrups and lemon water, 
and of the big and luscious watermelons that are so 
popular in Cairo, display their wares beneath awnings 
of orange-colored sackcloth, or in the full glare of the 

260 



OLD CAIRO 

sun, and, their prayers comfortably completed or per- 
haps not yet begun, the worshipers stand to gossip, or 
sit to smoke their pipes, before going on their way into 
the city or the mosque. There are noise and perpetual 
movement here. Stand for a while to gain an impres- 
sion from them before you mount the steps and pass 
into the spacious peace beyond. 

Orientals must surely revel in contrasts. There is 
no tumult like the tumult in certain of their market- 
places. There is no peace like the peace in certain of 
their mosques. Even without the slippers carefully 
tied over your boots you would walk softly, gingerly, 
in the mosque of El Movayad, the mosque of the col- 
umns and the garden. For once Avithin the door you 
have taken wings and flown from the city, you are in a 
haven where the most delicious calm seems floating like 
an atmosphere. Through a lofty colonnade you come 
into the mosque, and find yourself beneath a magnifi- 
cently ornamental wooden roof, the general effect of 
which is of deep brown and gold, though there are 
deftly introduced many touches of very fine red and 
strong, luminous blue. The walls are covered with 
gold and superb marbles, and there are many cjuota- 
tions from the Koran in Arab lettering heavy with gold. 
The great doors are of chiseled bronze and of wood. In 
the distance is a sultan's tomb, surmounted by a high 
and beautiful cupola, and pierced with windows of jew- 
eled glass. But the attraction of this place of prayer 

261 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

comes less from its magnificence, from the shining of 
its gold, and the gleaming of its many-colored marbles, 
than from its spaciousness, its airiness, its still seclu- 
sion, and its garden. Mohammedans love fountains and 
shady places, as can surely love them only those who 
carry in their minds a remembrance of the desert. They 
love to have flowers blowing beside them while they 
pray. And within the immensely high and crenelated 
walls of this mosque long ago they set a fountain of 
pure-white marble, covered it with a shelter of lime- 
stone, and planted trees and flowers about it. There 
beneath palms and tall eucalyptus-trees even on this 
misty day of the winter, roses were blooming, pinks 
scented the air, and great red flowers, that looked like 
emblems of passion, stared upward almost fiercely, as 
if searching for the sun. As I stood there among the 
worshipers in the wide colonnade, near the exquisitely 
carved pulpit in the shadow of which an old man who 
looked like Abraham was swaying to and fro and whis- 
pering his prayers, I thought of Omar Khayyam and 
how he would have loved this garden. But instead of 
water from the white marble fountain, he would have 
desired a cup of wine to drink beneath the boughs of 
the sheltering trees. And he could not have joined 
without doubt or fear in the fervent devotions of the 
undoubting men, who came here to steep their wills in 
the great will that flowed about them like the ocean 
about little islets of the sea. 

262 



OLD CAIRO 

From the "Red Mosque" I went to the great mosque 
of El-Azhar, to the wonderful mosque of Sultan Has- 
san, which unfortunately was being repaired and could 
not be properly seen, though the examination of the 
old portal covered Avith silver, gold, and brass, the gen- 
eral color effect of which is a delicious dull green, re- 
paid me for my visit, and to the exquisitely graceful 
comb-mosque of Kait Bey, which is beyond the city 
walls. But though I visited these, and many other 
mosques and tombs, including the tombs of the Khalifas, 
and the extremely smart modern tombs of the family 
of the present Khedive of Egypt, no building dedicated 
to worship, or to the cult of the dead, left a more last- 
ing impression upon my mind than the Coptic church 
of Abu Sergius, or Abu Sargah, which stands in the 
desolate and strangely antique quarter called "Old 
Cairo." Old indeed it seems, almost terribly old. Silent 
and desolate is it, untouched by the vivid life of the 
rich and prosperous Egypt of to-day, a place of sad 
dreams, a place of ghosts, a place of living specters. 
I went to it alone. Any companion, however dreary, 
would have tarnished the perfection of the impression 
old Cairo and its Coptic church can give to the lonely 
traveler. 

I descended to a gigantic door of palmwood which 
was set in an old brick arch. This door upon the out- 
side was sheeted with iron. When it opened, I left be- 
hind me the world I knew, the world that belongs to 
• 263 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

us of to-day, with its animation, its impetus, its flash- 
ing changes, its sweeping hurry and "go." I stepped 
at once into, surely, some moldering century long hid- 
den in the dark womb of the forgotten past. The door 
of palmwood closed, and I found myself in a sort of 
deserted town, of narrow, empty streets, beetling arch- 
ways, tall houses built of gray bricks, which looked as 
if they had turned gradually gray, as hair does on an 
aged head. Very, very tall were these houses. They 
all appeared horribly, almost indecently, old. As I stood 
and stared at them, I remembered a story of a Russian 
friend of mine, a landed proprietor, on whose country 
estate dwelt a peasant woman who lived to be over a 
hundred. Each year, when he came from Petersburg, 
this old woman arrived to salute him. At last she was 
a hundred and four, and, when he left his estate for the 
winter, she bade him good-by forever. For ever ! But, 
lo ! the next year there she still was — one hundred and 
five years old, deeply ashamed and full of apologies for 
being still alive. " I cannot help it," she said. " I ought 
no longer to be here, but it seems I do not know any- 
thing. I do not know even how to die!" The gray, 
tall houses of old Cairo do not know how to die. So 
there they stand, showing their haggard fagades, which 
are broken by protruding, worm-eaten, wooden lattices 
not unlike the shaggy, protuberant eyebrows which 
sometimes sprout above bleared eyes that have seen 
too much. No one looked out from these lattices. Was 

264 



OLD CAIRO 

there, could there be, any life behind them? Did they 
conceal harems of centenarian women with wrinkled 
faces, and corrugated necks and hands ? Here and 
there drooped down a string terminating in a lamp cov- 
ered with minute dust, that wavered in the wintry' wind 
which stole tremulously between the houses. And the 
houses seemed to be leaning forward, as if they were fain 
to touch each other and leave no place for the wind, 
as if they would blot out the exiguous alleys, so that 
no life should ever venture to stir through them again. 
Did the eyes of the Virgin Mary, did the baby eyes 
of the Christ child, ever gaze upon these buildings? One 
could almost believe it. One could almost believe that 
already these buildings were there when, fleeing from 
the wrath of Herod, Mother and Child sought the 
shelter of the crypt of Abu Sargah. 

I went on, walking with precaution, and presently I 
saw a man. He was sitting collapsed beneath an arch- 
way, and he looked older than the world. He was clad 
in what seemed like a sort of cataract of multicolored 
rags. An enormous white beard flowed down over his 
shrunken breast. His face was a mass of yellow 
wrinkles. His eyes were closed. His yellow fingers 
were twined about a wooden staff. Above his head was 
drawn a patched hood. Was he alive or dead? I could 
not tell, and I passed him on tiptoe. And going always 
with precaution between the tall, gray houses and beneath 
the lowering arches, I came at last to the Coptic church. 

26s 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

Near it, in the street, were several Copts, large, fat, 
yellow-skinned, apparently sleeping, in attitudes that 
made them look like bundles. I woke one up, and 
asked to see the church. He stared, changed slowly 
from a bundle to a standing man, went away and pres- 
ently, returning with a key and a pale, intelligent- 
looking youth, admitted me into one of the strangest 
buildings it was ever my lot to enter. 

The average Coptic church is far less fascinating than 
the average mosque, but the church of Abu Sargah is 
like no other church that I visited in Egypt. Its aspect 
of hoary age makes it strangely, almost thrillingly im- 
pressive. Now and then, in going about the world, one 
comes across a human being, like the white-bearded 
man beneath the arch, who might be a thousand years 
old, two thousand, anything, whose appearance suggests 
that he or she, perhaps, was of the company which was 
driven out of Eden, but that the expulsion Avas not 
recorded. And now and then one happens upon a 
building that creates the same impression. Such a 
building is this church. It is known and recorded that 
more than a thousand years ago it had a patriarch 
whose name was Shenuti ; but it is supposed to have 
been built long before that time, and parts of it look as 
if they had been set up at the very beginning of things. 
The walls are dingy and whitewashed. The wooden 
roof is peaked, with many cross-beams. High up on 
the walls are several small square lattices of wood. The 

266 



OLD CAIRO 

floor is of discolored stone. Everywhere one sees wood 
wrought into lattices, crumbling carpets that look al- 
most as frail and brittle and fatigued as wrappings of 
mummies, and worn-out matting that would surely be- 
come as the dust if one set his feet hard upon it. The 
structure of the building is basilican, and it contains 
some strange carvings of the Last Supper, the Nativity, 
and St. Demetrius. Around the nave there are mono- 
lithic columns of white marble, and one column of the 
red and shining granite that is found in such quantities 
at Assuan. There are three altars in three chapels fac- 
ing toward the East. Coptic monks and nuns are re- 
nowned for their austerity of life, and their almost lierce 
zeal in fasting and in prayer, and in Coptic churches 
the services are sometimes so long that the worshipers, 
who are almost perpetually standing, use crutches for 
their support. In their churches there always seems to 
me to be a cold and austere atmosphere, far different 
from the atmosphere of the mosques or of any Roman 
Catholic church. It sometimes rather repels me, and 
generally makes me feel either dull or sad. But in this 
immensely old church of Abu Sargah the atmosphere 
of melancholy aids the imagination. 

In Coptic churches there is generally a great deal of 
woodwork made into lattices, and into the screens which 
mark the divisions, usually four, but occasionally five, 
which each church contains, and which are set apart 
for the altar, for the priests, singers, and ministrants, for 

19' 

267 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

the male portion of the congregation, and for the wo- 
men, who sit by themselves. These divisions, so dif- 
ferent from the wide spaciousness and airiness of the 
mosques, where only pillars and columns partly break 
up the perspective, give to Coptic buildings an air of 
secrecy and of mystery, which, however, is often rather 
repellent than alluring. In the high wooden lattices 
there are narrow doors, and in the division which con- 
tains the altar the door is concealed by a curtain em- 
broidered with a large cross. The Mohammedans who 
created the mosques showed marvelous taste. Copts 
are often lacking in taste, as they have proved here and 
there in Abu Sargah. Above one curious and unlat- 
ticed screen, near to a matted dais, droops a hideous 
banner, red, purple, and yellow, with a white cross. 
Peeping in, through an oblong aperture, one see a sort 
of minute circus, in the form of a half-moon, containing 
a table with an ugly red-and-white striped cloth. There 
the Eucharist, which must be preceded by confession, is 
celebrated. The pulpit is of rosewood, inlaid with ivory 
and ebony, and in what is called the " haikal-screen " 
there are some fine specimens of carved ebony. 

As I wandered about over the tattered carpets and 
the crumbling matting, under the peaked roof, as I 
looked up at the flat-roofed galleries, or examined the 
sculptures and ivory mosaics that, bleared by the pass- 
ing of centuries, seemed to be fading away under my 
very eyes, as upon every side I was confronted by the 

268 



OLD CAIRO 

hoary wooden lattices in which the ckist found a home 
and rested undisturbed, and as I thought of the narrow 
alleys of gray and silent dwellings through which I had 
come to this strange and melancholy "Temple of the 
Father," I seemed to feel upon my breast the weight of 
the years that had passed since pious hands erected this 
home of prayer in which now no one was praying. But 
I had yet to receive another and a deeper impression 
of solemnity and heavy silence. By a staircase I de- 
scended to the crypt, which lies beneath the choir of the 
church, and there, surrounded by columns of venerable 
marble, beside an altar, I stood on the very spot where, 
according to tradition, the Virgin Mary soothed the 
Christ child to sleep in the dark night. And, as I stood 
there, I felt that the tradition was a true one, and that 
there indeed had stayed the wondrous Child and the 
Holy Mother long, how long, ago. 

The pale, intelligent Coptic youth, who had followed 
me everywhere, and who now stood like a statue gaz- 
ing upon me with his lustrous eyes, murmured in Eng- 
lish, " This very good place ; this most interestin' place 
in Cairo." 

Certainly it is a place one can never forget. For it 
holds in its dusty arms — what? Something impalpable, 
something ineffable, something strange as death, spec- 
tral, cold, yet exciting, something that seems to creep 
into it out of the distant past and to whisper: 'T am 
here. I am not utterly dead. Still I have a voice and 

269 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

can murmur to you, eyes and can regard you, a soul 
and can, if only for a moment, be your companion in 
this sad, yet sacred, place." 

Contrast is the salt, the pepper, too, of life, and one 
of the great joys of travel is that at will one can com- 
mand contrast. From silence one can plunge into 
noise, from stillness one can hasten to movement, from 
the strangeness and the wonder of the antique past one 
can step into the brilliance, the gaiety, the vivid anima- 
tion of the present. From Babylon one can go to Bulak; 
and on to Bab Zouweleh, with its crying children, its 
veiled women, its cake-sellers, its fruiterers, its turbaned 
Ethiopians, its black Nubians, and almost fair Egyp- 
tians ; one can visit the bazaars, or on a market morn- 
ing spend an hour at Shareh-el-Gamaleyeh, watching 
the disdainful camels pass, soft-footed, along the 
shadowy streets, and the flat-nosed African negroes, 
with their almost purple-black skins, their bulging eyes, 
in which yellow lights are caught, and their huge hands 
with turned-back thumbs, count their gains, or yell their 
disappointment over a bargain from which they have 
come out not victors, but vanquished. If in Cairo there 
are melancholy, and silence, and antiquity, in Cairo may 
be found also places of intense animation, of almost 
frantic bustle, of uproar that cries to heaven. To Bulak 
still come the high-prowed boats of the Nile, with 
striped sails bellying before a fair wind, to unload their 
merchandise. From the Delta they bring thousands of 

270 



OLD CAIRO 

panniers of fruit, and from Upper Egypt and from 
Nubia all manner of strange and precious things which 
are absorbed into the great bazaars of the city, and are 
sold to many a traveler at prices which, to put it mildly, 
bring to the sellers a good return. For in Egypt if one 
leaves his heart, he leaves also not seldom his skin. 
The goblin men of the great goblin market of Cairo 
take all, and remain unsatisfied and callincr for more. I 
said, in a former chapter, that no fierce demands for 
money fell upon my ears. But I confess, when I said 
it, that I had forgotten certain bazaars of Cairo. 

But ^\•hat matters it? He who has drunk Nile wa- 
ter must return. The golden country calls him; the 
mosques with their marble columns, their blue tiles, their 
stern-faced worshipers; the narrow streets with their 
tall houses, their latticed windows, their peeping eyes 
looking down on the life that flows beneath and can 
never be truly tasted ; the Pyramids with their bases in 
the sand and their pointed summits somewhere near the 
stars; the Sphinx with its face that is like the enigma 
of human life; the great river that flows by the tombs 
and the temples ; the great desert that girdles it with a 
golden girdle. 

Egypt calls — even across the space of the world; 
and across the space of the world he who knows it is 
ready to come, obedient to its summons, because in 
thrall to the eternal fascination of the "land of sand, 
and ruins, and gold" ; the land of the charmed serpent, 

271 



EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS 

the land of the afterglow, that may fade away from the 
sky above the mountains of Libya, but that fades never 
from the memory of one who has seen it from the base 
of some great column, or the top of some mighty pylon; 
the land that has a spell — wonderful, beautiful Egypt. 



272 



l^^^^^mooy 



